For less than a month, Telegram has had its own advertising platform, a form of financing called Telegram Ad Platform or Telegram ads.
The change in Telegram had been advanced a few months before by Pavel Durov, founder of the platform, when he spoke of the need to create a system that would generate income to sustain the viability of the platform.
The novelty now is not the arrival of advertising to Telegram, but something that was expected: the ads in the app can be avoided in exchange for subscribing to a payment system.
Durov confirmed it this Monday, November 8 in his Telegram channel, which says in Russian: “many users have suggested to us the possibility of introducing an option to deactivate the ads, so we have finally made the decision to go in that direction.” The new feature will arrive “this month”, according to Durov, and it will be “a cheap subscription” (also the words of the CEO of Telegram), but it is not known what that price is.
According to Durov, this will allow “any user to directly and economically support” the development of WhatsApp’s competing messaging application and “never again see official announcements on the channels.”
Likewise, the founder of the application explained that some channel administrators will be able to deactivate the ads for all users who are part of their community, although he did not clarify whether these content generators will have to pay or not to activate that option.
When Telegram announced the launch of its advertising platform, it assured that there would only be ads on mass channels, not on chat lists or in private conversations or groups.
According to the company, advertising would be reserved only for large channels, which are, according to Telegram, “services that already have ads and whose support carries the highest costs for Telegram.”
Telegram’s biggest competition, WhatsApp (from Meta Platforms), still has no advertising in its ecosystem, although there has been talk of that possibility for some time.
What it is possible to do is a campaign through Facebook Ads to generate click-through ads to WhatsApp, but only for WhatsApp Business and Business.
Ads within Telegram can only promote products within that platform, such as channels or bots. Each ad consists of a text and a button that links to the advertised product. The maximum length of ad text is 160 characters, including spaces.
Advertisers can choose the language and themes of the channels in which they want to display their advertising. Similarly, specific channels can be chosen.