Telegram recently announced that it topped 1 billion downloads and half a billion monthly active users.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on Tuesday that over 70 million new users joined the social media platform from Facebook and its suite of applications. The recent Facebook outage that lasted for over six hours globally caused a significant number of its daily users to seek alternative service providers including Telegram, Discord, and Signal.
The out-of-norm user proliferation is expected to continue, should Facebook and a suite of applications including WhatsApp and Instagram continue with its way of service delivery. “I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users,” wrote Durov on his Telegram channel. “That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time,” he added.
Notably, Telegram recently announced that it topped 1 billion downloads and half a billion monthly active users. Yesterday’s announcement of more than 70 million new users adds to the company’s growing market dominance.
Moreover, there has been an increased need for privacy-sensitive social media platforms, as observed with the increased development of decentralized platforms. Through emerging technologies like artificial intelligence combined with blockchain technology, the creation of Web 3.0 is materialized. Notably, Web 3.0 is dubbed as the awaited savior from centralized companies that have dominated the global market since the creation of the internet.
The European antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager noted the outage was a clear demonstration of the dangers of relying on just a few big players in a single market. Vestager urged the need for more players in the market to come up and compete equally with big companies.
What Telegram Offers to New Users
There are several reasons why Telegram has recorded a huge number of new users in the past few years. Among them, the platform is simple, heavily encrypted, open, and secure. Additionally, the platform takes pride in enabling groups that can hold up to 200,000 members.
Notably, the messaging app anticipates hitting 1 billion users by next year. As of April last year, the platform was adding 1.5 million users daily.
Currently, the firm does not have advertisements on private chats, thus no revenue is generated. However, the company has been quoted as saying that it will introduce paid features for enterprise clients.
Notably, the company’s quest to introduce a crypto token dubbed TON was thwarted last year by most regulators including in the United States. The company was compelled to refund investors who had invested in the company through the TON project.
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