The wildly popular messaging app Telegram is poised to join an elite group of platforms with over 1 billion monthly active users within the next 12 months, according to its founder Pavel Durov.
In a rare media interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson published on Tuesday, Durov said the Dubai-headquartered service that provides free cloud-based messaging, voice/video calling and file sharing is “spreading like a forest fire.”
Telegram has emerged as one of the most widely-used social media apps in Ukraine and Russia amid the ongoing conflict between the two nations. Its encryption and content-sharing capabilities have allowed users to communicate and access information despite censorship attempts.
Hitting the 1 billion monthly user milestone would be an extraordinary feat for the platform. Only a handful of technology giants like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and WeChat currently lay claim to user bases of that massive scale.
Durov’s confidence in Telegram’s continued explosive growth trajectory likely stems from the app’s rising popularity not just in Eastern Europe, but worldwide. Many view its security features and lack of aggressive data harvesting as key differentiators from rivals.
While the founder did not provide specifics, Telegram will probably need to maintain its current blistering pace of adding hundreds of millions of new users annually to reach Durov’s billion user projection within a year. The app crossed 700 million monthly actives in 2022.
