Durov Channel 🇮🇩

All large social media apps are easy targets for criticism due to the content they host. I can’t recall any major social platform whose moderation has been consistently praised by traditional media. The media coverage of Meta's moderation efforts has been particularly negative for most of its history. Interestingly enough, Meta was also the first social media company to have reached a trillion-dollar-plus valuation. Telegram will likely have to go through similar growth stages before it surpasses legacy platforms. As we rapidly rise in scale and significance, we shall solve any potential challenges the same way we do everything else — with efficiency, innovation and respect for privacy and freedom of speech.

👨‍💻 This week we launched the first batch of Telegram Business features. Users can now convert their personal Telegram accounts into business accounts. As a result, they will be able to add their location and opening hours, organize chats with color labels, use automatic greeting/away messages and shortcuts for quick replies. That’s just the start — we are shipping more Telegram Business features this month. One of these features will revolutionize how people interact with chatbots. Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats. With AI, these chatbots can bring customer service automation to an entirely new level. The new Bot APIs for developers will become available later this month, all for free. Stay tuned — more exciting stuff is coming for businesses and developers on Telegram this season.

Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour while Instagram and Facebook were down. Interestingly, Telegram is more reliable than these services — despite spending several times less on infrastructure per user. We also have about 1000 times (!) fewer full-time employees than Meta, but manage to launch new features and innovate faster. Throughout 2023, Telegram was unavailable for a total of only 9 minutes out of the year’s 525,600 minutes. That’s a 99.9983% uptime 🏅

😝 Next month, channel owners on Telegram can start receiving financial rewards from their work. Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views monthly. Currently, only 10% of these views are monetized with Telegram Ads — a promotion tool designed with privacy in mind. In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries. Channel owners in these countries will start receiving 50% of any revenue that Telegram makes from displaying ads in their channels. To ensure ad payments and withdrawals are fast and secure, we will exclusively use the TON blockchain. Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners in Toncoin. This will create a virtuous circle, in which content creators will be able to either cash out their Toncoins — or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels 🤑

The Saved Messages feature launched by Telegram 7 years ago has since become an industry standard. But now it’s time for the industry to move beyond the simple “sending a message to myself” concept we introduced years ago. This past week, we evolved Saved Messages into an advanced yet easy-to-use Bookmarks/Favorites/Notes service, with new options to organize and view saved content. This comes on top of many other features we launched this past month. Speaking of which, I personally love the animation of the new one-time voice and video messages — it is pure art. Enjoy! https://telegram.org/blog/new-saved-messages-and-9-more

📹 We've made some great improvements to video message recording on iOS. Now, you can enjoy clearer video quality, switch between front and back cameras more quickly, experience less camera shake, and have the ability to pause and resume recording. Plus, we've introduced one-time video messages. However, a minor bug was identified during the feature's initial launch two days ago. If you're encountering any issues with video message recording, please make sure your Telegram app is updated. 💫 For our Telegram Premium subscribers, there's a mighty update: you'll now be able to see the 'last seen' of other users who share this information, even if you choose to keep your 'last seen' hidden. The same logic now applies for the ‘read’ times in private chats. There are more new features in this update — they will remain secret until our official blog post is out later this month 🤫

🚀 5 million users are now subscribed to Telegram Premium — just 1 month (!) after we reached 4 million subscriptions. 🥳

🎆 I wish all our users peace, happiness, prosperity and inspiration in the new year. I have a very good feeling about 2024 ✨ Today we launched a new version of Telegram to let you congratulate your loved ones using our new, beautiful voice calls. The update contains a few surprises that we didn't cover in the blog – let's see if you can discover them 🎁 P. S. Stay healthy and don’t drink alcohol — don’t forget about the gym tomorrow 💪

🍭Merry Christmas, Telegrammers! The newest Telegram update lets you celebrate in style and congratulate your loved ones in new ways ❤️ With this update, you can also forward messages from channels to stories. Check out the full list of new features in our blog! 🧦 These are not all of our presents for you this festive season. Another major Telegram update is coming in the next few days 🛷 🎏

🎩😂👋☃️🌟🕯🥶👼 🔤🔤🔤🔤🔤 🔤🔤🔤🔤🔤🔤🔤🔤