How to check a Telegram channel's real statistics (and spot fake subscribers)

A subscriber count is the easiest number to fake on Telegram and the least useful on its own. And a big number has never been worth more:

• since 2024 Telegram shares half of its ad revenue with channels of 1,000+ subscribers (Telegram);
• since June 2025 channels can charge readers for direct messages (Telegram);
• since July 2025 anyone can pay a channel in Stars or Toncoin to publish a suggested post, a built-in market for paid placements (Telegram);
• and channels still sell ads of their own.

Buying subscribers is cheap, so the incentive to fake them is strong.

This guide shows how to check a channel before you buy an ad, partner with it or simply decide whether to trust it. The benchmarks come from our own daily data on thousands of public channels; you won't find them in other guides.

The 60-second check

1. ERR: what share of subscribers sees a typical post within a day? The median is 5.6%. Far below that for the channel's size is a red flag.
2. Growth chart: steady, or sudden jumps that nothing explains?
3. Views over time: do views on new posts build up gradually, or arrive all at once?
4. Engagement: do readers react and repost, roughly in line with views?
5. Citations: does any other channel mention it?

Search for the channel at the top of this page: every channel page here shows all five. The rest of this guide explains each one and what "normal" looks like.

What Telegram shows, and to whom

Anyone can see a public channel's subscriber count, each post's view counter, its reactions and, if comments are on, its replies. Two details matter:

• Views include forwarded copies. When a post is forwarded to another chat or channel, views there are added to the original's counter (Telegram). A widely reposted post can show more views than the channel has readers.
• Subscribers are hidden. You can't see who subscribed, only how many.
• Posts are found through search too. Since July 2025 Premium users can search posts across all public channels (Telegram), so a post can keep gaining views from people who don't follow the channel. Compare posts at the same age (below) rather than old posts with new ones.

Admins get much more. Telegram offers advanced statistics for channels with more than 500 subscribers (Telegram): follower growth, how many people joined and left, the share of subscribers with notifications on, views by source, new followers by source, subscribers' languages and the hours when they read (Telegram API: statistics). Only admins can open this (on mobile: channel name → Statistics; on desktop: channel info → the statistics icon).

That gives the most reliable check of all: if you are about to pay a channel, ask the admin for screenshots of its Statistics page and compare them with the public numbers below. Pay most attention to:

• views by source: real channels get views from followers, plus from forwards and other channels; a channel whose views come mostly from "other" or from a single source deserves questions;
• followers by source: where subscribers came from; thousands joining through one link in one day is a purchased campaign or a giveaway;
• the share with notifications on: bought accounts rarely change their notification settings.

1. Reach: how many people actually read it

Reach is the average number of views a post collects in its first 24 hours. It is the closest public number to "how many people read this channel". Because views keep coming for days, comparing posts at the same age keeps channels comparable.

How fast do views arrive? We record the view counter of new posts every hour. Across 5,270 posts from public channels in November 2026 that reached 100+ views, a typical post had, of the views it had after two days:

Real readers arrive in a curve like this: fast at first, then slower as people open the app. Views that arrive almost all at once, or that are nearly identical on every post, point to bought views. The "Views as a post ages" chart on our channel pages shows this curve for each channel.

2. ERR: reach as a share of subscribers

ERR (engagement rate by reach) is reach divided by subscribers. It answers the question that matters to advertisers: how many of the subscribers actually see a post?

Across channels with at least 1,000 subscribers in our data, the median ERR is 5.6%. It falls as channels grow, so compare a channel with others of its size:

• Well above the median for its size: a loyal audience, or posts that are widely reposted.
• Far below it: many subscribers no longer read, or never did. The extreme case is channels that grew through game rewards and giveaways. In November 2026 the crypto game channel @blumcrypto had about 12.7 million subscribers and an ERR of about 0.25%: one subscriber in 400 sees a typical post.

ERR also varies by topic: news channels are read more than, for example, channels people joined for a one-off reward. The current medians for each category are in our Telegram statistics research.

3. Growth history: how the audience was built

Open the subscriber chart and look at its shape.

• Steady, gradual growth, with bumps on days the channel was mentioned elsewhere, is what organic growth looks like.
• A sudden jump of thousands of subscribers that no repost, mention or news event explains is the classic sign of bought subscribers. Check "Who reposts and mentions it" for that period.
• A jump that has an explanation is fine. Pavel Durov's channel (@durov) grew from about 2.7 million to more than 13 million subscribers in 2024, the year of Telegram's crypto-game boom and of Durov's arrest in France, when he was in the news worldwide. Then it slowly declined, to about 10 million in November 2026: a normal shape after a wave of attention.
• Sharp drops often follow purchases: Telegram removes deleted and banned accounts, and bought subscribers are frequently among them. Telegram's moderation is large-scale: it reports more than 30 million groups and channels blocked in 2026 alone (Telegram).
• Slow decline is normal. Most channels lose some subscribers every month. Over the last 30 days 81% of the channels we track shrank, so a flat or gently falling line can still mean a healthy channel.

4. Engagement: do readers react?

Reactions, comments and reposts show whether readers care, not just whether posts were displayed. To compare channels of different sizes, compare them per 1,000 views. For posts with more than 1,000 views in our data (November 2026), the medians were:

• about 14 reactions per 1,000 views;
• about 1.6 reposts per 1,000 views.

A channel far below both on every post, especially with high view counts, is a warning sign. Our channel pages show the engagement rate (ER): reactions, reposts and comments divided by views. Note that channels can switch reactions off, so no reactions at all is not proof of anything on its own.

5. Citations: does anyone else take it seriously?

Real channels get reposted and mentioned by other channels. The "Who reposts and mentions it" section and the citation index on a channel page show who cites it and how big those channels are. A channel with a large audience that no other channel ever mentions deserves a second look, and the list also shows where its new readers come from.

Signs of fake subscribers and views

No single number proves fraud. These are patterns to look for together:

Other things to check before you advertise

• Posting frequency and ads. How often the channel posts and what share of posts are marked as ads. A channel that is mostly ads delivers less attention to yours. Our ad share counts only posts marked as ads, so paid posts without a label aren't in it: also look at how many posts promote other projects.
• Rank among its peers. A channel's rank in its category and country is more useful than its rank on Telegram as a whole.
• Age and history. Years of consistent history are hard to fake; a big channel created last month is a risk.
• Audience language and country. Check that it matches yours: our channel pages show the channel's language and the country of its audience.

Tools for checking channel statistics

All public tools see the same raw data: what Telegram shows anyone. They differ in how often they check, how they calculate each metric and which channels they cover, so small differences between them are normal. How we calculate ours is on the methodology page.

What public data can't tell you

Public statistics can't see who the subscribers are, where they live, or whether a view came from a real person. They show patterns that are consistent with a real or an inflated audience, not proof. When real money is at stake, combine them with the admin's own Telegram statistics.

Sources

Newest first. Benchmarks from our own database are as of November 2026; figures in bold and the size table update automatically.

• Telegram moderation overview: groups and channels blocked in 2026 (read November 2026).
• Telegram blog: public post search (July 2025), suggested posts (July 2025), direct messages to channels (June 2025), sharing ad revenue with channel owners (2024).
• Telegram: channels: view counters, forwarded views, statistics threshold.
• Telegram API: statistics: what channel statistics contain.
• TelegramInformer database: view timing, engagement medians and channel examples. See the methodology for how each is calculated.