The other ‘gram
The biggest social media company you’ve (probably) never heard of is nearing a billion users. Telegram, a global social media and messaging giant that only ~1 in 4 Americans are actually familiar with, has just reached 900 million monthly active users globally, with CEO Pavel Durov touting a potential IPO.
Despite its relatively low profile in the US, the platform has been making waves in other countries since its launch in 2013 — largely thanks to its apparent emphasis on privacy and security, which has helped it notch hundreds of millions of downloads in India, parts of South America, and Russia, where the app was originally founded.
Group chats
Telegram is many things to many people. It’s a place to joke with friends; a means for freedom fighters to arrange protests; a valuable outlet to get news to readers where media is censored… but, it’s also a place where people go to buy guns, drugs, fake bank cards, and was (or maybe still is) a major platform for terror groups to organize and spread information on.
While that wide range of uses has landed Telegram in hot water with governments and lawmakers from Brazil to Iraq, it’s also supercharged its growth. Indeed, adding nearly a billion users in roughly a decade puts it in an elite category of apps — particularly considering that it reportedly only has 50 full-time staff, a pretty tiny group that now wields a substantial amount of global influence.
