Recently several apps that have been free for a long time started offering paid tiers in order to create a revenue stream that's more aligned with users and relies less on ads.
Twitter was one of the first ones to do it almost a year ago. Snapchat joined a couple of months ago, and so did Telegram.
In its first three months, Telegram's revenue has grown exponentially, doubling every month.
We estimate that in August, monthly gross revenue reached $1.2 million across the App Store and Google Play. That's $812,000 of net revenue that Telegram gets to keep after giving Apple and Google their fees.
In case you're curious, about 83% of that total came from the App Store, where Russia has the most paying subscribers.
And speaking of paying subscribers, knowing the subscription price, we estimate Telegram's paying subscriber base to be around 257,000 at the end of August, up from 154,000 at the end of July.
Twitter launched its paid tier about a year ago and I expected it to become the poster child for monetization given its massive userbase. But if you remember the newsletter from two weeks ago, where I looked at Twitter's MRR in August, you know that it's nowhere near these numbers. It's about a half.
Yes, Twitter's monthly revenue from its app is around half of what Telegram made in August. And Telegram's paid tier has only been around for three months.
This means Telegram is doing something right, and that Twitter isn't...
Well done, Telegram!
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