How Telegram.hr in Croatia built a successful subscription model in a country where users won’t pay

Telegram.hr grew subscriptions 54% in 2025 despite Croatia’s low payment culture, thanks to an innovative campaign and daily news podcast success.

“When it comes to subscriptions in 2025, we ended up with a 54% growth in revenue. Not counting our first year [a decade ago], it was our best year,” Telegram.hr CEO Miran Pavić said to FatChilli on a recent morning catch-up call.

“When we started, it was all about, ‘Oh, you can’t do this in Croatia. No one will pay. People like free content. Who’s going to pay for your stupid content?’ But it’s always the same reaction,” Miran recalls.

Telegram Media Grupa was founded in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2015, as a digital media company with the flagship news portal Telegram.hr.

Pavić had considered launching a subscription program since the company’s inception, but waited until 2021, believing it was too early for Croatia due to limitations in the local payment infrastructure.

In early 2026, direct audience revenue now constitutes a significant part of overall revenue, and Telegram.hr is the leader on the Croatian market.

Yet, Croatian audiences remained reluctant to pay for online news. The proportion taking out a subscription, donation, or membership was at 6%, one of the lowest figures in the 2025 Digital News report survey, which is based on data from six continents and 48 markets.

Still, Telegram.hr managed to remarkably grow their subscriptions and also their advertising income, Miran told us. And on top of that, pulled off a widely successful 10th anniversary campaign similar to the one the Slovak Dennik N launched at the beginning of the year.

Do not confuse Telegram.hr with Telegram, the social app

It is important to note that Telegram.hr is a completely separate and unrelated entity from the global messaging application Telegram.

Also known as Telegram Messenger, it was founded by the Durov brothers and initially released in 2013. By 2015, when Telegram.hr, the news outlet, was founded, it had amassed more than 60 million active users. In other words, it was already a very popular brand.

“There was a newspaper in Croatia back in the ’60s. And it was a more liberal progressive newspaper. We were inspired by this newspaper, even though when we started, the Telegram messaging app was already fairly popular,” explained Miran.

“All of our employees get friend requests and connection requests on LinkedIn. And then we receive messages from people saying, ‘I have this issue with my Telegram app,’ ‘I’m unable to block this person,’ ‘I’m getting spam,’ etc. And we have to answer politely, ‘Well, thank you for your message, but unfortunately, it had nothing to do with us.'” 

Regardless, Telegram.hr, the news portal, quickly established its niche by focusing on investigative journalism and publishing long-form reports, especially concerning corruption within Croatia.

The publication’s commitment to hard-hitting news was cemented by the arrival of prominent investigative journalists like Drago Hedl, internationally recognized for his reporting on war crimes during the Croatian War of Independence.

Subscribe to our newsletter for more publisher stories and strategies straight into your inbox.

The transition to reader revenue and its strategic significance

For Telegram.hr, establishing a sustainable revenue source was essential for its survival and independence in a challenging political climate.

Although Telegram Media Grupa reaches approximately 1.3 million unique monthly users, relying solely on reader donations was insufficient. Securing advertising revenue was difficult because the Croatian economy is largely dominated by public businesses. This financial strain, coupled with the commitment to high-stakes journalism, pushed CEO Miran Pavić to experiment with a subscription model.

“Our strategy, when we started in 2021, was to really go for just the hardcore Telegram fans. In our messaging, we were really honest, and we reached out to our readers and said we needed their support. We were dealing with a boycott of the government-controlled advertisement budgets and with many legal expenses for the lawsuits for our reporting,” Miran revealed.

“There were not a lot of publishers with paywalls when we launched, and others immediately went to offer discounts and free trials. We said no, we really wanted to get the most loyal people who were really extremely motivated to support Telegram.”

And the long-term goal? Miran told us they would like to get to 30,000 subscribers. And according to our most recent chat, the organisation is well-positioned to reach that goal.

In 2021, Telegram.hr launched a subscription on a large proprietary platform used by global publishers, but soon found out they needed a different approach.

“We’ve learned that platforms the biggest publishers use are probably really good for publishers with huge teams, huge in-house resources, a lot of resources to pay for the top packages with consulting and all of those to be able to customize the solution the way they want it,” Miran explained.

Telegram.hr is, by all international measures, a small publication, even though it is a national outlet in Croatia with a substantial reach and a large audience.

They went on to look for alternatives, preferably used by peers in the region. “We decided that REMP was really the solution that offered us 90% of the functionalities for a fraction of the price. More importantly for us, it also helped us to customize and build out many more things that we previously could not do without huge resources.”

REMP is, of course, the Readers’ Engagement and Monetization Platform created by Slovak independent daily Dennik N, and Miran has been in contact with the leadership for many years.

Dennik N’s innovative 10th anniversary campaign in January 2025 caught the attention of Telegram’s leadership, who drew direct inspiration for their own upcoming milestone celebration.

Telegram.hr deliberately positioned itself as the most expensive news subscription in Croatia at €9.99 per month (for its Premium tier), a pricing strategy that initially drew skepticism from competitors.

Despite concerns that the price point was too high for the Croatian market, the outlet maintains its premium positioning based on product value and has achieved market leadership in subscriptions. But it wasn’t easy, and there is a long way ahead.

“It just takes a lot of time. You really have to find a way to emotionally and functionally appeal to the audience. People respond the same way in every single market. You have to be honest, appeal to the readers, and say why this is important, why they should consider supporting you, joining you on the journey. And not just saying, ‘Well, now you have to pay,” Miran explained in detail Telegram’s approach to direct audience revenue.

In 2023, Telegram Media Grupa received an investment from Pluralis, an impact investment fund, which acquired a minority stake in the publishing company.

Pluralis is an impact investment vehicle, managed by the Media Development Investment Fund, designed to invest in independent media companies across Europe, safeguarding editorial independence and fostering media pluralism.

Note: FatChilli helped launch Telegram.hr’s subscription stack on the REMP platform and continues to maintain it.

Telegram.hr’s 10th anniversary successful campaign with an over 80% conversion rate

In 2025, Telegram.hr celebrated 10 years since its founding and was planning to run a big subscription drive.

The 10th anniversary promotional campaign was a pivotal moment in Telegram’s subscription journey, aiming to achieve rapid and massive growth.

The campaign ran for one month, from April 8th to May 7th. It was directly inspired by a similar highly successful initiative implemented by the Slovak Dennik N.

The main goal was ambitious: to acquire 3,000 new subscribers. If successful, the publisher committed to fulfilling 10 promises aimed at improving the media landscape.

The campaign utilized a “pay-what-you-want” model for a 10-week promotional period of premium content. While the recommended price was €5, users were given a zero-euro option if they were unable to pay.

The campaign was promoted across Telegram.hr’s portal, newsletters, social media, radio, cinemas, and other public spaces. Existing subscribers were directly asked to recommend content.

Public figures, intellectuals, and politicians actively supported the campaign by sending authentic video selfies.

The entire company was involved in communicating the campaign online, primarily through Facebook and their private profiles.

The campaign results significantly exceeded expectations. Telegram.hr acquired 7% more subscribers than their 3,000-person goal (3,209 to be precise). 

“Interestingly, only 50% of the users opted for the free subscription, and the average paid amount was €4.06,” Drago Grahovac, Head of Digital Subscription at Telegram.hr, told FatChilli.

Overall, the campaign led to a 27% growth in the total subscriber base and a three- to four-fold increase in the base of registered users.

Following the initial 10-week trial period, participants were offered a 50% discount on a premium subscription for the subsequent six months. The retention rate was exceptionally high: nearly 80% of users chose to remain subscribed after the introductory offer concluded.

New subscribers were onboarded with special newsletters and thank-you emails, explaining plans.

The campaign concluded with a unique 24-hour “grand finale” offer: users could purchase a lifetime premium subscription for €399.

The results were in line with expectations, but Drago Grahovac noted a surprising detail: “a high share of the users who bought the lifetime subscription were existing subscribers, and they wanted to support us additionally, and it felt really great.”

The company is considering running the lifetime offer again for a limited one- or two-day period.

Even though the campaign cast a wide off-platform net across all main mediatypes (radio, cinemas,…), Grahovac told us internal on-site communication brought in the most registered users and paying subscribers. 

By internal comms, Grahovac meant the on-site marketing messages and banners set up with REMP’s Campaign module that allowed Telegram to display real-time data of how many subscribers have joined.

Readers could also easily click through and see also the 10 promises that were split into 3 goals, each after reaching one thousand new subscribers.

Dennik N, which ran a similar campaign with very similar initial results in January 2025 and in February reported over 90-thousand subscribers (85k of them paying), had over 74-thousand subscribers after Q3 of 2025 and stayed over 70k at the end of 2025.

Telegram CEO Miran Pavić, during our 2026 January call, also said they have seen significant churn after all discount periods ended.

“We managed to broaden the funnel and get more people engaged with the product. What we also saw was that people who churned after the initial promotional campaign ended remained as registered users and started using the site more. Some of them we were able to convert back to paying customers with additional promotions later down the line,” Miran added.

Success of the daily podcast and a growing book publishing business

There was one more significant development in how Telegram’s audiences got their news in 2025. In April, the newsroom launched their first daily news podcast – Prvi glas, with Filip Raunić, Telegram’s Video and Audio Editor, leading the effort.

“Telegram’s podcast is designed as a daily brief without noise – 15 minutes of analysis on the topic of the day in a relaxed and censorship-free edition. Which, I believe, seems self-evident to most, but I’m not entirely sure that there are many media like Telegram [in Croatia] for which something like this applies,” said Raunić.

The podcast quickly reached the top list of the most listened to podcasts in the country, topping shows from publications like The Economist, the BBC, the New York Times, and other global media and podcast giants.

In November 2025, Prvi glas recorded more than 2.3 million views and listens on all platforms; the average episode had almost 120,000 listens and views. In a press release, Telegram stated that it was its fastest-growing news format in 2025.

The newfound interest in audio among Telegram’s readers sparked a curiosity in the leadership, and in early 2026, the outlet started an experiment by adding audio versions of its articles generated by ElevenLabs artificial voices.

“We do think that, especially considering what we’re doing in podcasts and the audio versions of articles, there’s a lot to do generally in audio. One of our acquisitions is actually a radio network here in Croatia that’s really popular. We definitely think that audio as a format is going to be big for us in the coming years,” Miran revealed, and you could see they are all really proud of what they managed to build so far.

The North Star of reaching 30-thousand paying subscribers is still there, and Telegram is getting there step by step. When asked about the plans for 2026, Miran responded: “In 2025, we started publishing a lot more books [published 14 titles in 2025], which have also seen tremendous revenue growth, and we want to continue to offer more products people can buy from us.”

“We have also had a very successful launch of the daily podcast, so [in 2026] we want to do more in that area, especially to add video segments, as we have already been using some video recordings to create clips, which were very successful on social media,” Miran added.

Telegram is also looking to finalize some acquisitions on the Croatian market in 2026, and in our conversations, Miran kept returning to stress the importance of growing direct audience revenue.

“In general, as far as the media is concerned, the tidal wave is coming: the world does not need 117,000 identical pancake recipes, and only the media that have a real, in-depth, authentic, and not accidental relationship with the audience can count on survival,” Miran wrote recently, which coincidentally encapsulates Telegram’s strategy with its audience over the last 10 years.