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Updated [January 9, 16:10 ]: The number of Telegram Premium subscribers has exceeded 5 million users, the founder of the popular messenger Pavel Durov, who is known to be «non-Russian» (explanation here).
On the one hand, this is far from 20 million, which Durov previously called the minimum required amount to cover all expenses of premium Telegram, on the other hand — The messenger jumped from 4 million to 5 million premium subscribers in a month, and the path to these same 4 million took a year and a half. In other words, the growth rate of Telegram Premium subscribers has accelerated significantly.
The other day, a representative of Telegram said that the company does not have any assets in Russia and does not know why in this same Russia they suddenly canceled all the fines that had previously been imposed by the local courts of the terrorist country. Interestingly, the fines imposed by Russian courts on Google and YouTube, owned by Alphabet, Meta, TikTok, were also paid, since all listed companies mysteriously disappeared from the state register of debtors after updating the records at the beginning of the year.
Original news text from December 8: The number of Telegram Premium subscribers exceeded 4 million within a year and a half after launch
Telegram launched a paid subscription in mid-June 2022, and now it has become known that the number of premium subscribers has exceeded 4 million – the last time the messenger shared statistics was in December 2022, when their number exceeded the first million.
The achievement was shared personally by the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov. He especially noted that Telegram Premium is the most successful and fastest-growing paid subscription in history among all instant messengers.
The number of Premium subscribers has doubled in just 5 months and quadrupled in the last 12 months. Today it has exceeded 4 million users.
Thank you to everyone who subscribed to Premium!
In the summer, Stories appeared in Telegram, and the launch of the function, which Instagram borrowed from Snapchat, was dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the messenger. Since the beginning of the war, Telegram's popularity in Ukraine has increased significantly and remains a phenomenally popular means of communication and one of the main media platforms for disseminating news.
When launching the subscription, Durov said that to cover all expenses, premium Telegram must be purchased by 2.5-3% of users – at that time 700 million used the messenger monthly (in July the active audience exceeded 800 million), and 2 .5% corresponded to 17.5 million (3% — 21 million).
How safe is Telegram in general
The issue of the danger of Telegram and other social networks, especially for the military, has been raised and discussed several times recently, including at the highest government levels – at the end of September 2023, the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine, together with the relevant departments, began actively considering the issue regulation of the Telegram messenger. This is mainly due to the spread of propaganda and hatred on the platform, as well as the use of it by Russians to spread their narratives.
Telegram is also criticized for the lack of end-to-end encryption in regular chats (it is only in “secret chats” and calls). At the beginning of 2023, Petcube co-founder Yaroslav Azhnyuk published a column in Ukrayinska Pravda and The Kyiv Independent entitled “Why Ukraine does not restrict the use of Russian Telegram?.” In it, he outlined seven points that Telegram should not be trusted, and quoted Budanov, who allegedly said that “the FSB, and only they, have the keys to Telegram.” No direct evidence of this statement was ever found, and Telegram, in its official refutation of the words, noted that most of Azhnyuk’s arguments are based on the Wired article (it says that Telegram’s standard tools allow you to monitor the actions of users, and Russian intelligence services may even have access to closed chats), which was published in February of this year and “contains more than 50 errors.” There are also many questions about this material (many subjective assumptions without any facts to support these judgments).
It remains to remember that Pavel Durov is an Emirati programmer of Russian origin who really does not like being called Russian, but has never directly publicly called the Russian Federation an aggressor and a terrorist state that started a war with one goal – the genocide of Ukrainians . He is also one of the creators and former CEO of the Russian social network VKontakte, which was banned and blocked in Ukraine back in 2017.
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