Telegram Shares Ad Revenue With Public Channel Owners, Payments In Toncoin

Justin Hyun, director of investment at the Ton Foundation, (photo: x @ton_ecosystem)

Telegram Messenger introduces a new reward system that will allow channel owners with substantial number of subscribers to earn 50% of the ad revenue displayed on their channel in Toncoin (TON), the project's original cryptocurrency.

Starting March 31, Telegram introduced a gift system that would allow channel owners with substantial number of subscribers to earn 50% of the ad revenue displayed on their channel in Toncoin (TON), the project's original cryptocurrency.

But the public channel must have at least 1,000 customers to qualify.

This plan was first unveiled in February 2024 by Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, when he announced the launch of the Telegram Advertising Platform to open revenue streams for channel owners.

Since the announcement, the price of TON has increased 111% from USD 2.51 on February 29 to USD 5.30 on April 1, according to Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView. If calculated in rupiah, the price of TONS rose from IDR 39,911 to IDR 84,114.

According to the company, the Telegram channel generates more than one trillion views each month, and channel owners will be able to withdraw their share of free advertising revenue.

Telegram is also the third largest messaging app by monthly downloads, after WhatsApp and Snapchat, according to Statista.

To support this initiative, Telegram added Toncoin as one of the payment methods for buying ads on the platform. However, Telegram only displays ads on the Telegram channel, depending on the type of content shared by the channel.

Prior to the launch of the official revenue stream, the Telegram channel owners monetized their followers by selling paid posts, charging fees to join private channels, and selling products.

Justin Hyun, director of investment at the Ton Foundation, said that blockchain-based mini-decentralized apps (DApps) on Telegram, also known as Mini Apps, could be a " Troya horse" for mass blockchain adoption.

"That's our theory of bringing more users to the blockchain without the need to educate them about blockchain. That's the Trojan's way of saying: look, you let all users' apps be friendly, and we wouldn't even call them DApps [...] It's just the Mini Telegram App they use either in their channel, "said Hyun.

Hyun plans to bring 500 million people into the network by 2028 with a simple initial use case where users are not always aware of the underlying blockchain interaction.