The leadership at Telegram has decided to share advertisement-based revenue with channel owners on its platform. These rewards will be allocated in the form of Toncoin – the native cryptocurrency of the TON blockchain. So essentially, when advertisements displayed on a particular channel fetch revenue, 50 percent of it will be given to the owner of the channel in the form of Toncoin tokens. This development is going into effect starting Friday, March 1.

“Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views monthly. Currently, only 10 percent of these views are monetised with Telegram Ads. In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries,” revealed Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, while making the announcement.

A tool of messenger marketing that lets merchants create sponsored posts; the Telegram Ad Platform is a fast way to broadcast advertisements on channels with tens of thousands of followers. Now that Telegram is set to allow advertisers from around a hundred nations to circulate their promotional content through the app, it decided to give back to its community. From a bigger perspective, with this incentive program, Telegram could also be looking to increase the number of people creating channels on the platform and bringing engagement to the app – contributing to the overall engagement on the platform.

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

Following this announcement, the Toncoin token spiked in value by over 40 percent this week. The token as of Friday, March 1 is trading at $2.64 (roughly Rs. 218) after it recorded a profit of 3.12 percent in the last 24 hours as per CoinMarketCap. The fully diluted market cap for Toncoin at present stands at $13.6 billion (roughly Rs. 1,13,126 crore).

It is however noteworthy, that Telegram has not yet disclosed the criteria for revenue sharing, TechCrunch reported. The end-to-end encrypted messaging platform caters to around 800 million users from around the world, statistics tracked by Business of Apps show.