Telegram channel owners will receive a share of ad revenue, rewards will be dispersed as TON tokens

Telegram management has decided to share ad revenue with channel owners on its platform. These rewards will be distributed in the form of Toncoin – the native cryptocurrency of the TON blockchain. So essentially, when ads shown on a certain channel generate revenue, 50 percent of that revenue will be given to the channel owner in the form of Toncoin tokens. This development takes effect from Friday 1 March.

“Telegram broadcast channels generate 1 trillion views per month. Currently, only 10 percent of those views are monetized with Telegram ads. In March, the Telegram advertising platform will be officially open to all advertisers in nearly one hundred new countries,” revealed Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, while making the announcement.

An instant messaging marketing tool that allows marketers to create sponsored posts; the Telegram advertising platform is a fast way to broadcast ads to channels with tens of thousands of followers. Now that Telegram is set to allow advertisers from around a hundred nations to distribute their promotional content through the app, it has decided to give back to its community. From a broader perspective, with this incentive program, Telegram can also aim to increase the number of people creating channels on the platform and engaging with the app – contributing to the overall engagement of the platform.

“This will create a virtuous circle in which content creators will be able to either cash in their fines — or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels,” Durov added.

Following this announcement, the Toncoin token jumped over 40 percent in value this week. As of Friday, March 1, the token was trading at $2.64 (roughly Rs. 218) after recording a gain of 3.12 percent in the last 24 hours according to CoinMarketCap. The total market capitalization for Toncoin currently stands at $13.6 billion (roughly Rs. 1,13,126 crores).

However, it is worth noting that Telegram has not yet revealed the criteria for revenue sharing, TechCrunch reported. The end-to-end encrypted messaging platform serves about 800 million users worldwide, a statistic tracked by Business with applications show.