2021 was a great year for Telegram. The messaging app hit one billion total downloads in August 2021. Following that, when Facebook had a six-hour-long global outage in October 2021, Telegram gained 70 million new people in just one day. Find out how Telegram became the anti-Facebook app for people.
The New Telegram
Telegram has built a name for itself as the alternative to apps like WhatsApp and Facebook. Recently, the company rolled out a new plan which enables large channel owners to publish sponsored posts and offer paid subscriptions, from which Telegram will take a cut. This new plan should help monetize the app. Telegram has claimed that it will never offer targeted ads based on users’ data.
Is Telegram Truly Safe?
Elies Campo — who works for growth, partnership, and business development at Telegram — has spoken about how the Russian app still holds distrust for America. He also questions the transparency of the app, claiming that their work is completely opaque. Campo also suggests that Telegram always can monitor somebody’s private communication, even though doing it on a large scale would be difficult. It is possible to deactivate the encryption between user and cloud for targeted accounts. Pavel Durov, the Russian entrepreneur behind the app, has commented that he prefers to use his channel for communication, where his words can’t be twisted. The company likes to keep its distance from communicating with the external world, stating that it could defocus them from work.