Telegram plans ad-hiding subscription model

It was recently announced that chat service Telegram wants to add advertising to the app in the long term. This will happen – at least initially – on a limited scale. Now interesting news is coming out that Telegram may want to offer subscription models to users.

Subscription model at Telegram

Telegram is an advanced, comprehensive and enjoyable chat app. The service is completely free to use, without any advertisements. Recently it was announced that work is being done on showing advertisements in Telegram. These will, however, be relatively unobtrusive and must meet strict requirements. But for those who don’t want anything to do with advertising in their chat app, another solution is being worked on; a subscription model.

With the subscription model, advertising can be turned off for a fee. In the Telegram channel of CEO and founder Pavel Durov, several options are being prepared to hide advertisements. Users can turn off official ads themselves, and channel managers can turn off ads for all users. Durov gives the following explanation about this;

Many users have suggested introducing the ability to disable official advertisements in Telegram channels. Today we are announcing two more changes:

1. Users will be able to disable official advertisements.

We have already started work on this new feature and look forward to launching it this month. It can be issued in the form of an inexpensive subscription, which will allow any user to directly financially support the development of Telegram and never see official advertisements in the channels.

2. Channel authors will be able to turn off official advertisements in their channels for all users.

Some channel creators would also like to “turn off” advertisements in their channels for all users. At the moment, we are calculating the economic conditions for this option. Advertisers will soon be able to place an “invisible” ad on any channel that – assuming there is sufficient cost per impression – will result in no ads on that channel.

We will continue to work on features that will allow Telegram to break even. The interests of users and content authors will remain our priority in this process.

The solutions are currently being inventoried and developed by Telegram. It is not known what the subscription models will cost and when they should be available.