Telegram Premium has attracted over 1 million subscribers, less than six months since the popular instant messaging app launched the paid offering and seriously began to monetize the business.

Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov shared the update on his channel Tuesday, calling the milestone "one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched.

The subscription, however, still "represents just a fraction of Telegram's overall revenue," he shared in the same update, optimistically hoping that one day Premium will rake in just as much money as ads.

The app, which has more than 700 million monthly active users, rolled out Premium late in June, providing its customers with a number of extra features such as the capacity to send files up to 4 GB and faster downloads. The monthly subscription costs around $6 ~$5 (H/T Techmeme) in the U.S. and the U.K. and $2.2 in emerging markets like India.

Telegram is pushing its monetization efforts at a time when its chief rival, WhatsApp, is also on the hunt for ways to make money. WhatsApp is free, and there is no paid tier, but its parent firm Meta is increasingly bringing businesses into the instant messaging app. The firm appears to have dialed up its effort in recent months — and not everyone is happy about it.

The Dubai-headquartered Telegram, which has said in the past that it needed to make money to keep the platform afloat, citing computing costs, plans to expand its monetization efforts next year, Durov said. The firm is developing a host of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and exchanges, he said late last month.

"Thanks to successful monetization, Telegram will be able to pay for the servers, traffic and wages necessary to keep building new features and supporting existing ones. While some other apps consider their users a tool to maximize revenue, we consider revenue a tool to maximize value for our users," Durov wrote Tuesday.