How to read the Telegram channel map
Every dot on the map is one of 3 million public Telegram channels. Colour tells you the category, size tells you the audience, and position tells you the subject. Here is everything else the map can do.
What do the colours mean?
Colour is the channel's category. Grey dots have no clear category. Because position follows the subject, colours form patches: a blue patch of education channels, an orange patch of news. A dot of a different colour inside a patch is a channel whose category and subject disagree, for example a news channel that mostly posts about crypto. The full list is in what is on the map.
Colours of the most common categories.
- Education
- News
- Religion
- Crypto
- Games
- Sports
- Politics
- Movies
- Music
- No clear category
What does the size of a dot mean?
Size is the number of subscribers, in eight bands: Under 1K, 1K–5K, 5K–20K, 20K–100K, 100K–300K, 300K–1M, 1M–3M, 3M+. Larger dots are drawn on top of smaller ones. Only 2.4% of the channels have 100K+ subscribers, so most of the map is made of small dots.
Why do the labels change when I zoom?
Labels come in three levels. Zoomed out you see 25 regions such as “crypto / trading”. Zoom in and they split into 250 topics, then into 2,500 narrow subjects. A label ending in “· ru”, “· ar” or another code means that most channels there write in that language. The chip under the search box always names the area in the centre of the screen.
The 529 channels with 1M+ subscribers get their names as soon as you zoom in a little. Past zoom level 4 the 20 largest channels in view are named and get their avatars.
How do I see a channel?
Hover a dot to see its name and subscriber band, click it to open a card with the avatar, subscribers, category, language and topics. “Channel stats” on the card opens the channel's TGScope page with reach, activity and history. Double-click zooms in, shift + double-click zooms out; on a phone, pinch.
How do I find channels about something?
Type what you are looking for in your own words, in any language, and press Find. Up to 100 channels that match by meaning light up and the rest of the map dims, so you can see where a subject lives and what sits next to it. Try learn english and look at which regions the hits fall into. How matching by meaning works is explained in the semantic search guide.
The language menu next to the search keeps only channels in one language on the map; everything else fades.
Can I share a place on the map?
Yes. The address bar always holds the current view: x and y for the centre, z for the zoom and q for the search. Copy the link and the other person sees the same area with the same highlighted channels. Links stay valid until the next version of the map.
Start zoomed out, pick a region that interests you and zoom until the names appear.