🎆 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 💪

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

🥳

📹 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 🤫

😝 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 🤑

10,000 subscribers of mine are now happily enjoying their Telegram Premium thanks to this giveaway I prepaid on Fragment a few hours ago. Congratulations! 🥳

As a result, my channel reached Level 9 and I was able to set a fancy emoji status ☕️ and a wallpaper suitable for a @nerd 🤓

This February, we redefined many-to-many communication by adding 9 new features for group chats.

Now, groups can publish stories and save them as posts on their profile pages for all their members to enjoy. Group chats can also set their unique wallpapers and statuses, both visible to all their members. Group appearance can now be customized in detail: for example, group admins can choose a color and a logo for the group profile cover, or the style of links.

All these features are already available and are unlocked by group members who 'boost' their favorite chats (boosters can get special perks in the groups). Groups that prefer not to ask their members for boosts can instead conduct giveaways, similar to what I did in this channel today.

We wanted to include 5 more features in this update, but the App Store Gods were not in our favor. You will see these features very soon in our March update! 🍀

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 🏅

👨‍💻 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.

💰 Last week, we issued $330M worth of bonds to ensure Telegram can keep expanding at an accelerated speed.

This bond offering was oversubscribed, and we were delighted to have global funds of the highest caliber with impeccable reputations as participants. The terms of the bonds (when adjusted for the Federal Reserve rate) were the most favorable for Telegram in the history of our company.

I am proud that every time we issue bonds we get better at this process. The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization. This will further solidify our position as an independent platform that is able to challenge the “Goliaths” of our industry.

🍿 Big Telegram update with 8+ new features is out.

The bot platform is entering a new era with the ability to add bots that can seamlessly manage personal and business accounts. All bot developers are welcome to check out the APIs and start building.

The rest of the new Business features are just as juicy. My personal favorite is the ability to customize the empty chat with you (I’ve always wanted to replace the “No messages here yet…” text with something more fun and add a sticker I like).

There are several features in today’s update that we haven’t described in the official blog, so soon we’ll publish another post to cover all that is new. It seems we are adding features faster than we can describe them 🚘 😂

9️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ Telegram reached 900 million monthly users.

Half of these 900 millions users open Telegram daily. According to DataAI, Telegram is the 🚩th most used and 🚩th most downloaded app in the world.

What’s more — Telegram was cash flow positive in the 1st quarter of 2024 and is on track to become profitable this year. This solidifies our position as an independent company that puts its users first.

When we started developing Telegram 12 years ago, we believed that people are inherently smart. And smart people will always choose the freedom and quality of Telegram over the restrictions and mediocrity of legacy apps. It seems we were right.

We’ve always believed in you. Thank you for believing in us too🙏

🎨 Our newest update lets you make your own stickers right here on Telegram — no additional image-editing software needed. Just go to the recent stickers panel and select “+”.

Creating sticker packs has never been so easy. The sticker platform has existed on Telegram since 2015, but it has now been truly democratized.

There are 16 other new features we are shipping this month, and most of them are already included in the latest version of Telegram. But I’ll tell about them later — for now, I’ll let you focus on sticker creation 🎨

📺 As a leader of a politically neutral platform, it is my responsibility to speak to journalists representing different political views. In February, I did a 3-hour interview with a journalist of liberal views. On the same day, I spoke to Tucker Carlson, who is famously conservative. This way I can remain fair to all audiences and tell the story of Telegram to everyone.

The interview with Tucker is coming out very soon. It will be in video format, which is quite rare for me — so be sure to check it out. I heard that Tucker is also launching an official Telegram channel, so let’s stay tuned for an announcement there 📣

🐥🐥 The full version of my interview with Tucker is out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ut6RouSs0w 🎙