What the data says about Telegram
We measured how many Telegram subscribers actually see a post. For the biggest channels it's 1 in 25
We compared views per post with subscriber counts for 45,691 active Telegram channels. Reach falls from 8.3% at 10,000 subscribers to 4.0% above a million, ad-heavy channels reach less than half as many people, gambling and shopping channels the fewest, and a post collects half its views in the first 24 hours
We mapped Telegram's hidden ad networks
We grouped 462,943 Telegram channel descriptions by the ad contact they list. 19.6% of channels above 10,000 subscribers share a contact with another channel, 3,866 contacts sell five channels or more, one seller is listed by 358 channels with 46 million subscribers, and city channels are sold as franchises across hundreds of cities
We reverse-engineered Telegram's channel IDs and now we can tell when each channel was created
We mapped the 15 blocks Telegram has used for channel IDs since 2015 from 247,850 dated channels. IDs were sequential until late 2017 and random within a moving block since. The blocks date 927,000 channels, show IDs crossing 2³¹ in May 2024 and blocks wearing out seven times faster in 2025, and trace new channels shifting from Persian and Russian to English, Chinese and Burmese
The Telegram channel census: 3 million public channels by size, language and topic
We counted 3,034,395 public Telegram channels between April and August 2026 and measured their size, language, topics, advertising and activity. Among channels above 10,000 subscribers Russian is the most common language, English matches it on audience, and Persian is third despite the ban in Iran
We checked 254,854 Telegram channels. One in five is dead
We measured the last post date of 254,854 Telegram channels against the moment we observed each one. 19.6% were dead for more than a year. English channels die at nearly twice the rate of Russian ones, and 90 channels with over a million subscribers each have gone silent
Telegram reach falls as posting frequency rises — but not for Ukrainian channels
We measured how many posts per day a channel actually publishes and what share of its subscribers see each one. Reach per post falls monotonically with frequency, but Ukrainian and wartime channels break the pattern completely