We mapped Telegram's hidden ad networks

The description of a Telegram channel usually ends with a line for advertisers: “Ads: @manager”, “Cooperation: t.me/agency”. That line is public, and it is the same line on every channel the manager sells. We read the descriptions of 462,943 channels with more than 1,000 subscribers and grouped the channels that list the same contact.

Among the 133,186 channels above 10,000 subscribers, 19.6% share a contact with at least one other channel, and 9.9% belong to a network of five channels or more. These are not small side projects: the larger the channel, the more likely it is sold as part of a group.

The contact line

Telegram runs its own ad platform, but most advertising in channels is still sold directly: a channel publishes a post for a fee. The seller is whoever answers the contact in the description: the owner, a manager on salary, or an agency that sells slots in dozens of channels it does not own. From outside we cannot tell these apart, and this article does not try to. What a shared contact does tell you is that the channels are sold together.

We took every @username and t.me link in each description and dropped those that are not contacts: email domains (“[email protected]” contains “@gmail”), bots, Telegram's own service links such as folders and boosts, and payment platforms that serve thousands of unrelated channels. A contact listed by two or more channels makes a network.

We have the description of 91% of channels between 10,000 and 100,000 subscribers, but only 39% below that. The figures in this article are for channels above 10,000 subscribers unless stated otherwise.

Most networks are pairs. A few run hundreds of channels

26,377 contacts are shared by two to four channels: typically one owner with a main channel and a spin-off or two. At the other end, 12 contacts are each listed by more than 200 channels.

The biggest sellers

Ranked by the audience they can sell, the top of the list is Russian. @spiral_yuri is listed by 358 channels with 46 million subscriptions, from app news to Moscow city channels. Three agencies that run their own channels, @tgpodbor_official, @swaymedia and @bidfox_news, appear on many of the same channels: large Russian channels often list two or three sellers at once. The largest English-language network sits under @strategy: 12 channels with 21 million subscriptions and names like venture, angellist and coinmarket.

One manager, two hundred cities

Some networks are franchises. A manager runs the same channel in city after city, with the same name pattern and the same contact. @serto4 is listed by 154 channels named “<city>_seychas” (“<city> now”): Barnaul, Cheboksary, Astrakhan and so on. @pinky_reklama sells 109 “<city>_podslushal” (“overheard in <city>”) channels, @ka_sofa 203 “<city>_interesnoe”, and @nati_nova 122 neighbourhood chats for the districts of Moscow.

For a local business these look like the city's own channels. For an advertiser they are one inventory that can be bought in bulk.

Russian, Burmese and French channels are the most networked

17.6% of Russian-language channels above 10,000 subscribers belong to a network of five or more, against 3.1% of English-language ones. Two smaller languages rank even higher: Burmese at 26.5%, where film and TV channels are run in batches, and French at 20.1%, driven by groups of streaming channels that share the same handful of contacts.

Sellers also overlap. When two contacts appear together on one channel, their networks touch, and following those links joins 5,102 channels with 224 million subscriptions into a single connected web, 94% of it in Russian. Two channels in that web may share nothing directly, but every channel in it is a step or a few away from every other through a common seller.

What gets sold in networks

Job boards are the most networked topic: 22.5% of channels with job tags belong to a network of five or more, mostly regional vacancy channels with one manager. News, film and lifestyle follow. Crypto is the least networked at 5.2%: most crypto channels list a contact of their own.

Networked channels have thinner audiences

For most channels we know the ratio of views on recent posts to subscribers. Compared at the same size, channels in networks get fewer views. Between 100,000 and a million subscribers the median networked channel gets 5.7% views per subscriber and the median independent one 8.4%. Above a million it is 2.5% against 5.7%. Networked channels are also more likely to be carrying ads already.

We do not know why. Bought subscribers, older audiences that stopped reading, or simply more ads per day would all push the ratio down, and our data cannot separate them. For an advertiser the consequence is the same: a post bought in a networked channel reaches fewer of its subscribers.

Some networks stand out. 11 Persian-language channels with short, random usernames such as km_ap, ga_os, se_pz share their ad contacts and hold 23 million subscriptions between them, up to several million per channel. Their median channel gets 3.0% views per subscriber.

Check a channel

Paste a channel's username or t.me link to see the networks it belongs to. The same lookup lives on its own page as the Telegram channel network checker.