👨‍💻 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.

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 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! 🍀

Telegram

Stories for Groups and 8 More Features

Telegram brings conversation in groups to an entire new level with 9 new features that redefine many-to-many communication. Now, groups can publish stories and save them as posts on their profile pages. Groups can set unique wallpapers and statuses, as well…

Fragment Auctions

Buy Telegram Premium

Use your crypto wallet to buy a Telegram Premium subscription for yourself or your friends and colleagues.

After my last post, some people expressed concern that, as a result of ad sales exclusively for TON, Telegram may end up holding an unhealthy share of Toncoin, which will be too concentrated for a decentralized ecosystem. We acknowledge these concerns and have come up with a solution.

To limit Telegram’s share of TON at ≈10% of the supply, we’ll be selling the upcoming surplus of our TON holdings to long-term investors — under 1-4 years lockup and vesting plan, but at a discount to the market price. This way free-floating TON will get locked up, stabilizing the ecosystem and reducing volatility.

😝 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 🤑