Telegram Will Only Share Its Ad Revenue in Countries Where Ad Platform Is Newly Introduced

Yesterday, Pavel Durov announced that starting from March of this year, Telegram will share half of its native ads revenue with channel owners. According to the "Durov's Code" channel, citing one of Telegram's advertising partners, payouts will only be made in countries that are new to advertising. For example, Russia is not among them, as the advertising platform in the Russian market was launched earlier.

In the new countries, Telegram will sell ads and reward channel owners only in TON cryptocurrency.

In regions where advertising has been running for a long time, the previous methods of payment for sponsored posts will remain.

Whether the reward system will ever be extended to countries where the advertising platform has already been launched is not reported.

#AboutAds

Pavel Durov speaks on the reliability and innovation of Telegram in comparison to other platforms

Pavel Durov has made confident remarks upon the outage of Facebook and Instagram, where he states Telegram has "1000x fewer full-time employees than Meta" and that "Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour" highlighting Telegram's surge in growth due to service outages of other platforms.

He states that Telegram "managed to launch new features and innovate faster." and has additionally "spent several times less on infrastructure per user.", implying Durov's strong belief that Telegram is at forefront of innovation in the messaging market globally, whilst still maintaining their strong monetization strategy. He also states that Telegram has only been down for around 9 minutes for the entirety of 2023. It is assumed this statistic is based on a scenario where all of Telegram's Datacenters experience an outage simultaneously, at one given time.

Telegram's Co-Operation with Malaysia

On Saturday, March 2, Malaysia's Minister of Communications held a personal meeting with Pavel Durov in Dubai. The news was brought to attention by Durov's Code.

The main topics of the meeting were platform regulation and the latest technologies, including artificial intelligence. Durov expressed interest in further discussions about opportunities for cooperation with the Malaysian government to optimize the regulatory aspects of the platform and promised to expand Telegram's activities in the country.

Pavel Durov also stated their platform's readiness to collaborate with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission to improve regulation and join forces in combating fraud and gambling.

Last May, Malaysia's Minister of Communications reported that Telegram "did not want to cooperate" with the ministry, despite numerous requests for a meeting.

Statistics for 2022 indicate that Malaysia has 32 million Internet users, of which 28 million are social media users. Telegram is used by 56% of Internet users in the country, providing a rough estimate of between 15-18 million users in Malaysia.

#Malaysia

Telegram Desktop Has Been Updated to Version 4.15.1

Here's what's new:

• Support for Telegram Business features have been added.
• Shared contacts in chats now have a new style.
• Link previews are now generated for links inside quote blocks.
• Privacy settings that require Telegram Premium now have icons to indicate this.
• When adding a new admin, they will now have admin rights to view chat history by default.
• Support for AVIF, HEIF, and JPEG XL formats has been added for the macOS version of the app.
• Built-in markup is now supported when exporting chats to HTML for replies.
• A character limit counter has been added when editing messages without media.
• An issue with editing long media captions containing emoji has been fixed.
• An issue causing the text about vote counts to be deleted in polls with reactions has been resolved.
• The character limit counter for the bio input field has been fixed.
• An error that occurred when sending .tgs files as stickers has been corrected.

Download: from official website or GitHub.

#update #desktop

Biometrics in Mini Apps

A function named BiometricManager has been discovered in the source code of Telegram Mini Apps tools.

Presumably, this function will allow mini apps to request verification from the messenger to confirm your identity as the device owner. This will enable services to enhance the protection of your data or assets.

The @tginfo editorial team believes that mini apps will not receive any data related to biometrics. The tool will be able to process a response from the Telegram client, which has methods for biometric confirmation.

#BotAPI

Disruptions in Telegram's Services

Users are reporting that there are disruptions within operating and using Telegram. In particular, issues are being experienced with the global search function, sending messages, loading chats, and interacting with bots. This post will be updated as more details become available.

UPD: This was already fixed.

UPD 17:02 UTC: Some users are still experiencing connection issues.

On March 13th users faced no disruptions.

#outages

Telegram Desktop has been updated to version 4.15.2

What's new:
• Opening hours 00:00 – 23:59 are now shown as “open 24 hours”.
• Reimplemented fast scrolling of the chat list when holding down the Ctrl or Shift key.
• The color of the “Enable notifications” menu item in their exception settings has been replaced with standard green.
• Fixed saving of empty working hours.
• Fixed display of dates in Recent Actions.
• Fixed account selection for automatic login to Telegram sites.
• Fixed a crash when trying to set an emoji status in the application settings window.

Download: from the official website or from GitHub.

#update #desktop

New Telegram Bond Issued for $330 Million

Pavel Durov announced that last week Telegram had issued bonds worth $330 million to accelerate the development of the messenger. The applications for bonds placement were oversubscribed, and on top of this, the majority of the buyers consisted of high-tier, high priced funds.

Telegram has previously issued bonds on:

• March 2021: The first bond placement for $1 billion.
• April 2021: Bonds placed for an additional $750 million.
• July 2023: Bonds were issued for $270 million, about a quarter of which were purchased by Durov himself.

#bonds

Detailed Statistics On Revenue From Telegram Ads

In the source code of Telegram for macOS, lines of code were noticed that will supposedly be used on the channel's info page for tracking income from Telegram Ads.

Based on the source code, the user can:

• View their advertising revenue statistics in TON cryptocurrency or in the US dollar equivalent.
• Check the current balance of TON available for withdrawal and its equivalent in US dollars.
• View a list of transactions reflecting advertising earnings and money transfers to a crypto wallet, indicating the time and amount.
• Enter the address of their TON wallet and withdraw some or all of the available funds to the wallet.

#aboutAds

DC2 Media Downloading Issues

Our users are reporting that DC2 is currently experiencing issues related with downloading media, whereas the download speed has dropped significantly due to issues on the server.

Updated 03/23/2024 09:54 UTC
On March 23th DC2 works properly.

#outages

Spain Blocks Telegram Over Distribution of Pirated Content by Users

A Spanish judge has ordered the temporary blocking of the popular messaging app Telegram in response to a lawsuit filed by several local media companies, including EGEDA, Mediaset España, A3 Media, and Movistar Plus. The decision, made by Judge Santiago Pedras of the National Court of Spain, comes as part of an ongoing investigation into allegations that Telegram users have been distributing pirated content.

The court had requested that Telegram provide technical data to help identify the owners of accounts allegedly used to infringe upon intellectual property rights. However, the messaging app failed to comply with this request, leading to the temporary blocking order and a six-month extension of the investigation.

According to the court ruling, the blocking must be implemented within three hours of receiving the official court notice. The order encompasses not only the Telegram apps, but also the Telegram.org website and the web version of the platform.

Telegram has a significant user base in Spain, with a recent survey by the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) indicating that approximately 8.5 million users rely on the messaging app, meaning this ban will affect a vast amount of people that use Telegram as an essential tool for communication on a day to day basis.

For more information about Telegram in Spainish, view @tginfoesp.

Chat for Spain: @tginfochates.

#bans #courts #Spain

Supreme Court of Spain Suspends Order to Block Telegram

Today, the Supreme Court of Spain suspended its order to block Telegram in the country as it awaits a police report on the impact of the temporary ban on users.

Judge Santiago Pedraz instructed the national police to prepare a report on "the characteristics of Telegram, as well as the impact of the temporary suspension on its users."

As a reminder, the order to block Telegram in Spain was issued on Friday, March 22.

#courts #bans #Spain

Monetisation Program for Channel Owners

Starting today, Telegram is introducing a reward system for content creators, allowing Telegram channel owners to receive 50% of the advertising revenue displayed in their channels.

Rewards for Content Creators

• Owners of public channels with 1,000 or more subscribers can receive 50% of the revenue from ads shown in their channel as a reward.

• Rewards can be withdrawn without any fees, or they can be used to pay for ads on Telegram, purchase collectible addresses, or for Premium subscription giveaways.

• Advertising revenue statistics can be tracked in Channel Settings > Statistics > Monetization.

• Reward withdrawals will become available to channel owners on the Fragment platform in the coming weeks.

Cryptocurrency-based Advertising with TON

• Now any user can promote their bot or channel on Telegram using Toncoin - with minimal budgets.

• When creating an ad message, you choose specific channels for placement - this way, you have full control over the context in which your ads will be shown.

• To create your own ad message, simply log in with your account on the Telegram Ad Platform.

• Currently, TON-based ads are not displayed to users in certain countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Palestine, and Israel.

Article: https://telegram.org/blog/monetization-for-channels

#update #aboutAds

Telegram for Android and iOS Updated to Version 10.10

Today, the second March update of Telegram was released. It includes new features for the Telegram Business feature set, and every user can now provide more information about themselves in their profile.

• User Birthdays: Users can now optionally set their birthdate in their profile and configure its visibility in privacy settings.

• Linking a Personal Channel to Profile: Any user can now specify a public channel they own in their profile.

• Linking a Chatbot to an Account: The previously announced feature to integrate a third-party bot into your account for automatically handling incoming messages and interacting with customers has been added. This option is part of the Telegram Business feature set.

• Custom Welcome Screen: You can now set your own title, text, and sticker for the welcome screen that users see when they start a conversation with you. This option is part of the Telegram Business feature set.

• Special Links for Contacting Users: Share short links with clients that, when clicked, start a conversation with you using a pre-written phrase. Statistics on the number of clicks are provided for each such link. This option is part of the Telegram Business feature set.

• Earning Revenue from Channel Ads: For some countries, it is now possible to withdraw 50% of the revenue earned from displaying ads in a channel. Payments will only be made in TON cryptocurrency.

Other new features include: disabling ads in a specific channel upon reaching level 50, improved privacy settings, and displaying information about collectible usernames directly in Telegram.

Android: Google Play, APK from the official website or verified channel.

iOS: App Store.

#update #Android #iOS

Bot API Updated to Version 7.2

Integration with Business Accounts:
• Added the BusinessConnection class and updates about connecting or disconnecting a bot to a business account, represented by the field 'business_connection' in the Update class.
• Added updates about deleting messages in a business account connected to a bot.

Acting on Behalf of Business Accounts:
• Added the field 'business_connection_id' to the Message class.
• Added the field 'sender_business_bot' to the Message class.
• Added the parameter 'business_connection_id' to the sendChatAction method.

Business Account Information:
• Added the classes 'BusinessOpeningHours' and 'BusinessOpeningHoursInterval'.
• Added the field 'business_opening_hours' to the Chat class.

Sticker Sets with Mixed Format:
• Removed the fields 'is_animated' and 'is_video' from the StickerSet class.
• Added the field 'format' to the InputSticker class.
• Removed the parameter 'sticker_format' from the createNewStickerSet method.
• Increased the maximum number of stickers in any set to 120.
• Allowed uploading stickers in WEBM format using SendSticker.

The full list of changes is available on the official website.

#update #BotAPI

Issues with Downloading Media

Our subscribers are reporting that they are experiencing problems when downloading media, voice messages, and video messages.

UPD. 16:24 UTC: The issue was resolved.

#outages