(Dubai) The founder and boss of the Telegram application, Pavel Durov, announced on Monday that his messaging had made a net profit for the first time in 2024, with a turnover of more than a billion dollars.
Posted at 12:27 p.m.
“As I predicted, 2024 turned out to be a very good year for Telegram. For the first time since the start of its monetization three years ago, Telegram has become profitable,” Durov announced on his Telegram channel.
The online messaging platform, headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, claims 950 million users worldwide.
It has long operated without advertising or paid services and has adopted a monetization policy since 2021, relying mainly on paid subscriptions offering exclusive features and the introduction of advertising.
Welcoming the tripling of the number of subscribers to the paid version of the application, Telegram Premium, exceeding according to him “twelve million” and the increase in its advertising revenue, Mr. Durov announced an annual turnover exceeding “a billion dollars”.
He also mentioned more than “$500 million” in cash reserves, not counting his cryptocurrency assets.
The year 2024 was marked by the placement in police custody and then the indictment at the end of August of the boss of the messaging platform by two French judges for a litany of offenses relating to organized crime, the justice system generally accusing him of do not act against the dissemination of criminal content on messaging.
Mr. Durov was released under heavy judicial supervision, including the obligation to provide a bond of 5 million euros and to report to the police station twice a week, and a ban on leaving French territory.
The affair caused a stir, with Moscow warning against “any political persecution”.
In mid-September, the 40-year-old billionaire, who has several nationalities (French, Russian and Emirati in particular), broke his silence for the first time since his arrest in a long message on Telegram.
In this message, he said he found it “surprising” to be held responsible for content published by other people and considered the French approach “ill-advised”.
However, he recognized that the sharp increase in the number of Telegram users had generated a situation which had “made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform”.
“If 99,999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities give a bad image” of the application, he declared.
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