Telegram, the instant messaging platform that competes with WhatsApp, has announced a surprising novelty in order to stop the traffic drain of channels that are moving to WhatsApp. To prevent Meta from continuing to take credit for a copied functionality, Telegram offers 50% of advertising revenue to content creators and owners of large channels to encourage their stay on Telegram.
Several months have passed since WhatsApp implemented the popular channel system that Telegram has had for years, and during this time, many users and content creators have started to give more priority to their channels on WhatsApp, where there is a higher number of active users. That is why Telegram is pulling out all the stops to keep one of the advantages that made it popular in the past within its ecosystem.
Telegram encourages creators
This announcement has been made by Telegram officially, so it is neither a rumor nor an April Fools‘ joke. In this way, all channel owners with a minimum of 1,000 subscribers will be able to be part of this monetization program that will provide them with 50% of the advertising revenue generated through their channels. With this, Telegram wants to reward creators who, in this way, end up attracting traffic and users to the ecosystem of this social network.
Monetization settings can be found within the settings of each channel, inside the statistics panel. With this, every user who meets the necessary requirements to receive 50% of the earnings, will receive from Telegram that sum generated directly by the ads that the app displays inside their channel.
Your tough competition with WhatsApp
The role of Telegram is not easy, far from having all the power and economic resources that its main competitor, WhatsApp, has thanks to being part of the powerful conglomerate of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company that brings together other successful social networks such as Facebook or Instagram. Telegram also has strong capital, but it still lacks the same capacity. Therefore, the app compensates for this deficiency with more original and risky moves, such as offering juicy benefits to content creators or offer disseminators.
Historically, in that sense, Telegram has always been one step ahead of its competition, although that has not been enough to surpass it. It has allowed it to fight on equal terms in a segment where it had a very difficult time, and that already has a lot of merit, because few social networks survive competing against Meta.
In fact, Meta is known for often copying its competition in order to benefit from the innovations that other platforms carry out. An example of this is the channels themselves, content models such as Reels copying TikTok, or the Stories, present in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which caused Snapchat to plummet to become a practically irrelevant competition.
Correction: The news article stated that Telegram is of Russian origin, which is incorrect. We have made the necessary correction. Telegram currently has its servers in Dubai.
According to Wikipedia, Telegram was created by Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov, who are of Russian origin, as a response to the problems they had with the Russian government with their previous social network VK.
