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 by Telegram founder Pavlo Durov. He especially noted that Telegram Premium is the most successful and fastest paid subscription in history among all messengers.

The number of Premium subscribers doubled in just 5 months and quadrupled in the last 12 months. Today it has exceeded 4 million users.

Thanks 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, the popularity of Telegram in Ukraine has increased significantly and still remains a phenomenally popular means of communication and one of the main media platforms for the distribution of news.

The Telegram phenomenon in Ukraine — since the beginning of the war, the time spent using the messenger has increased 8 times

When launching the subscription, Durov said that in order to cover all expenses, 2.5-3% of Telegram premium users should buy – at that time, 700 million people used the messenger every month (in July, the active audience exceeded 800 million), and 2.5% corresponded to 17.5 million (3% – 21 million).

How secure is Telegram in general?

The issue of the danger of Telegram and other social networks, especially for the military, has recently been raised and discussed several times, including at the highest state levels – at the end of September 2023, the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine, together with relevant departments, began actively considering the issue of regulating the messenger Telegram. This is mainly due to the spread of propaganda and hatred on the platform, as well as its use by the Russians to spread their narratives.

Telegram is also criticized for the lack of end-to-end encryption in regular chats (only in “secret chats” and calls). At the beginning of 2023, Petcube co-founder Yaroslav Azhniuk published a column in “Ukrainian Pravda” and The Kyiv Independent entitled “Why Ukraine does not limit the use of Russian Telegram?”. In it, he laid out seven points why 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 these claims was ever found, and Telegram, in an official refutation of the words, noted that most of Azhnyuk’s arguments are based on the Wired article (it states that Telegram’s standard tools allow monitoring of users’ actions, and Russian special services can even have access to closed ones). . chats), which was published in February this year and “contains more than 50 errors”. There are also many questions about this material (many subjective assumptions without any facts that would support these considerations).

It remains to mention that Pavlo Durov is an Emirati programmer of Russian origin, who does not like being called Russian, but has never directly publicly called Russia an aggressor and a terrorist state, which unleashed a war with one goal – the genocide of Ukrainians. He is also one of the creators and former general director of the Russian social network Vkontakte, which was banned and blocked in Ukraine in 2017.