How to find out when a Telegram channel was created
Telegram shows when you joined a channel, not when it was created. Age still matters: across 899,696 channels with 1,000+ subscribers, 24.9% of those with a million or more were created after May 2024, almost twice the share among channels with 10K–100K (13.4%).
Paste a username, t.me link or numeric ID and see the period the channel was created in.
Three ways to find a channel's age
1. Scroll to the very first message
Every new channel starts with a service message, “Channel created”, with a date. If the history is intact, that is your answer. It disappears when the owner clears the history, for example before rebranding a channel.
2. The “post number 1” link, and why it often fails
Adding /1 to a channel link (t.me/name/1) opens its first post. It only works if that post still exists. Deleted early posts, cleared history and channels bought and restarted under a new name all break it, and it never shows anything older than the first post that survived.
3. The channel's ID
Telegram hands out channel IDs from ranges that move forward over time, so a channel's ID tells you the period it was created in, even when its history is wiped. For channels created since 2021 the period is weeks to a few months; for 2017–2021 it can be several years. Our creation date checker does this from a username; the details are in our ID study.
Topics full of new channels
Giveaway, NFT and casino channels are overwhelmingly new. Below are the topics with the highest share of channels created after May 2024, among channels with 1,000+ subscribers.
Youngest topics: share of channels created after a given date.
| Topic tag | After May 2024 | After Feb 2025 | Channels |
|---|---|---|---|
| #prizes | 60.4% | 28.3% | 452 |
| #contests | 59.6% | 26.1% | 463 |
| #nft | 56.2% | 27.2% | 1,858 |
| #gifts | 55.9% | 31.6% | 820 |
| #burmese | 55.4% | 18.8% | 489 |
| #ton | 51.4% | 17.8% | 957 |
| #giveaways | 49.9% | 24.3% | 1,454 |
| #giveaway | 48.4% | 23.5% | 1,313 |
| #contest | 47.3% | 22.2% | 433 |
| #gift | 46.2% | 21.1% | 413 |
| #myanmar | 45.7% | 12.2% | 2,251 |
| #online-casino | 44.8% | 19.8% | 359 |
Topics where channels last
At the other end, religious and Iranian channels are mostly old: over 60% were created before mid-2021.
Oldest topics: share of channels created before June 2021.
| Topic tag | Before June 2021 | After May 2024 | Channels |
|---|---|---|---|
| #shia | 66.9% | 5.6% | 1,210 |
| #imam | 64.9% | 5.3% | 641 |
| #ashura | 64.7% | 4.9% | 391 |
| #tehran | 64.2% | 9.5% | 570 |
| #iran | 63.8% | 10% | 20,590 |
| #hussain | 63.6% | 6.3% | 442 |
| #mpsc | 63.5% | 6.2% | 340 |
| #sheikh | 62.2% | 5.7% | 336 |
| #bible | 61.9% | 9.1% | 307 |
| #azerbaijan | 61.3% | 5.9% | 555 |
Age by channel size
Share of channels by when they were created, by subscriber count.
| Subscribers | Before June 2021 | After May 2024 | Channels |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K–10K | 28.6% | 23.6% | 773,240 |
| 10K–100K | 41.6% | 13.4% | 115,996 |
| 100K–1M | 43.3% | 15.8% | 9,983 |
| 1M+ | 43% | 24.9% | 477 |
- Channels with 10K–1M subscribers have the fewest newcomers: only 13.4% of those with 10K–100K were created after May 2024.
- The million-plus tier is split: 43% were created before mid-2021 and 24.9% after May 2024. Of those 119 young giants, 73 are about crypto & trading.
- 3.3% of channels with 100K+ subscribers were created after February 2025. On its own that proves nothing; with low reach it is worth a closer look at the audience.
Questions
Can I see the exact date a Telegram channel was created?
Only if its first message, “Channel created”, is still in the history. Otherwise you can find the period it was created in from its ID, which is narrower for recent channels (weeks to a few months) than for channels from 2017–2021 (up to several years).
Why does the date of post number 1 not match the channel’s age?
Owners delete early posts, clear history or buy an old channel and start over. A link to post 1 then shows nothing, or shows the first post that survived rather than the real start.
Does a channel’s username tell me its age?
No. Usernames can be changed or bought at any time, so an old-looking name says nothing about when the channel itself was created.
Why does channel age matter?
Age helps separate established channels from ones that appeared recently with a huge audience, which is common in giveaway and crypto schemes. It also tells you whether a channel’s claimed history (“since 2018”) is plausible.
Methodology
Public Telegram channels with 1,000+ subscribers and a known channel ID, one row per ID, adult channels left out: 899,696 channels, data to 2026-09-04. Creation periods come from the ID ranges described in our ID study: “after May 2024” means IDs from the range opened on 16 May 2024 onward, “after Feb 2025” from 16 February 2025, “before June 2021” IDs below the range opened on 24 June 2021. Topic tags are labelled automatically; tags with fewer than 300 channels are not shown. Only channels that still existed when we checked them are counted.