How Does Telegram Make Money? The 2026 Breakdown

Telegram makes money from four sources: Premium subscriptions, ads in large public channels, crypto “exclusivity” deals tied to its TON blockchain, and a cut of in-app spending through Stars, gifts and its Fragment marketplace. In the first half of 2025, the latest period with reported figures, those streams brought in about $870 million, up 65% on a year earlier.

That figure comes from unaudited statements shown to Telegram’s bondholders and reported by the Financial Times in January 2026. Telegram is private and doesn’t publish audited accounts, so treat every number below as company-supplied rather than independently checked.

How Telegram makes money: revenue streams at a glance

Here’s how the money splits, using the most recent figures Telegram has shared with investors.

Sources: FT reporting on Telegram investor documents (May 2025) and unaudited bondholder statements (January 2026). The last row is $870M minus the three disclosed lines.

Premium: the most predictable money

Telegram Premium launched in June 2022. Subscribers pay a monthly fee, set country by country, for bigger uploads, faster downloads, voice-to-text, extra customization and no ads in channels.

Durov said in 2025 that more than 15 million people pay for it, roughly 1.5% of Telegram’s billion-plus monthly users. That’s the same freemium logic as Discord with Nitro: keep the core app free and sell extras to the people who use it most.

Premium brought in $223 million in the first half of 2025. Divide that by 15 million subscribers and six months and you get about $2.50 per subscriber per month. It’s a rough number, but it fits: prices are lower in many emerging markets, and Apple and Google take a cut of in-app purchases.

Ads in public channels

Telegram doesn’t put ads in private chats, groups or your chat list. Its ads are short sponsored messages inside large public channels, and Telegram says they’re matched to the channel’s topic, not to your personal data. Premium users don’t see them.

Since March 2024, owners of public channels with at least 1,000 subscribers have received 50% of the ad revenue from their channels, paid in Toncoin and withdrawn through Fragment, according to Telegram’s announcement. Advertisers can pay for ads in the same token.

Advertising earned $250 million in 2024 and $125 million in the first half of 2025, so it’s running flat. Spread across a billion monthly users, that’s about two cents per user per month. Set that against the $2.50 from each Premium subscriber and one paying user is worth roughly as much as 120 ad-viewing users.

That gap explains why “no ads” is a Premium selling point. It’s also a different path from WhatsApp under Meta, which has leaned on businesses paying to message customers.

The crypto deals most explainers miss

The largest line in Telegram’s first half of 2025 wasn’t ads or subscriptions. It was about $300 million from “exclusivity agreements” connected to Toncoin, the token on the TON blockchain that Telegram first designed. In 2024, “partnerships and ecosystem” revenue made up about half of the $1.4 billion total.

Some history helps: Telegram raised $1.7 billion in 2018 to build TON and a token called Gram, then abandoned the project after the US SEC sued. Under a 2020 settlement it returned $1.2 billion to investors and paid an $18.5 million penalty. Independent developers kept the network alive and named the token Toncoin.

Telegram has since pulled the network back in. In early 2025 it made TON the only blockchain allowed for Mini Apps, the small apps that run inside Telegram.

In May 2026, Durov said Telegram would take over from the TON Foundation as the network’s main driver and validator. The token was renamed Gram in June 2026, and in July Durov announced a built-in Gram wallet for every Telegram app.

The FT also reported that Telegram sold more than $450 million of Toncoin during 2025. Put simply, a big share of Telegram’s revenue moves with crypto prices, not with how many people open the app.

Stars, gifts, Fragment and Mini Apps

The rest comes from smaller in-app markets. Stars are Telegram’s digital currency for buying things inside bots and Mini Apps, opening paid posts and paying for channel subscriptions.

Collectible gifts are bought with Stars, and some can be upgraded into tradable items on TON. Fragment is Telegram’s own marketplace, where usernames and anonymous numbers sell at auction for crypto.

Telegram doesn’t report these lines separately. By subtraction they, plus anything else not disclosed, came to about $222 million in the first half of 2025.

Does Telegram make a profit?

Sometimes. 2024 was its first profitable year, and crypto pushed it back into the red within six months.

The 2025 loss came from writing down Telegram’s Toncoin holdings after the token fell about 69% during the year. The app itself was profitable before that hit. Telegram had targeted $2 billion of revenue and $720 million of profit for full-year 2025, but hasn’t made full-year results public as of October 2026.

You’ll also see “over $1 billion revenue and $547 million profit” for 2024. That was Durov’s own announcement, made before the year closed. The FT’s $1.4 billion and $540 million come from the later investor documents, so the two don’t really conflict.

Debt is part of the picture. Telegram funds itself with bonds, including a $1.7 billion convertible issue in 2025 that included backers such as BlackRock and Mubadala. Holders can convert at a 20% discount if Telegram lists before 2030, which is why IPO talk never quite goes away.

How does Pavel Durov make money?

Mostly on paper. Durov owns Telegram outright, according to the FT, so his wealth tracks what the company is thought to be worth. Forbes put his net worth at about $6.6 billion in March 2026.

He’s said he paid Telegram’s early costs himself, using money from VK, the Russian social network he co-founded and left in 2014. There’s no separate empire behind him. Telegram is the asset.

That concentration carries risk. A French investigation that began with his arrest in Paris in August 2024 remains open. In July 2026, Russia charged him with aiding terrorism and put him on a wanted list, which he denies, and a Russian lawmaker told citizens to avoid paid features and Gram purchases inside the app.

How much money does Telegram give creators?

Channel owners with 1,000 or more subscribers keep half of the ad revenue from their channels. Creators can also sell paid posts, charge for channel subscriptions and receive gifts in Stars, then convert eligible Stars to crypto through Fragment.

Telegram doesn’t publish typical payouts. Earnings depend on channel size, posting volume and how many viewers sit in countries where ads run.

My take

Strip out the crypto deals and Telegram still had about $570 million of half-year revenue from Premium, ads and in-app spending. That’s a real business, and Premium in particular is clean, recurring money.

The weak spot is how much of the headline depends on a token Telegram now controls, promotes and sells. Nothing about that is hidden, but it means revenue can swing with crypto sentiment, and one government’s action against Durov can hit the app and the token at the same time.

If you’re judging Telegram’s health from here, watch the unglamorous numbers. Premium subscribers and channel ads show whether a billion people will pay for a messenger. The crypto line mostly shows how the market feels about Gram that quarter.

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