Popular messaging platform Telegram has announced it is launching a new premium tier of its services as it seeks to monetize a part of its userbase. Reaching more than 700 million active users monthly, the new tier answers to the need of these users for more bandwidth and storage capacity, according to Pavel Durov, CEO of the company.
The premium tier is an answer to the requirements of a set of users that wanted to upgrade their bandwidth and storage from within the app, according to CEO Pavel Durov. He stated:
After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option.
Among the new features available for paid users are the extension of the number of channels that they can follow — 1,000, up from the 500 that the free tier offers — and also the creation of 20 chat folders with 200 chats in each folder. The pricing for this new service tier has not been disclosed as of writing, but according to Techcrunch, estimates are close to the six-dollar mark.
This is not the first attempt from Telegram to monetize services on the platform, which provides messaging and content management systems to thousands of individuals and companies at a worldwide level. The company introduced the feature of sponsored messages last year, allowing advertisers to put such messages in large channels with more than 1,000 subscribers.
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