What is Telegram? How it works, who runs it, and how safe it is

Telegram is a free messaging app for phones, computers and the web with more than a billion monthly users. It does what WhatsApp does, but two things make it different: channels, which turn it into a publishing platform with unlimited audiences, and bots and Mini Apps, which turn chats into small programs. Those two features explain most of what is interesting, and most of what is controversial, about Telegram.

This guide explains how each part works, how private Telegram really is, and what we see in the public channels we track every day. Every figure links to its source.

Telegram in numbers

Daily-user figures and country rankings you will see elsewhere are estimates by third parties that don't publish their methods, so we leave them out. Our own figures from public channels are in Telegram statistics.

Who makes Telegram, and how it pays for itself

Telegram was started by the brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov, who had earlier founded VK, Russia's largest social network. Pavel Durov financed it and runs the company; Nikolai designed its encryption protocol, MTProto. Durov left Russia in 2014 after refusing to hand over the data of Ukrainian protesters to the authorities, and lost control of VK as a result (Telegram press page). Telegram's team is now based in Dubai.

For most of its life Telegram ran on Durov's own money. It now earns from four sources (Telegram FAQ):

• Telegram Premium (since 2022), an optional subscription with higher limits and extra features;
• sponsored messages (since 2021): short ads shown in large public channels, never in private chats;
• Telegram Stars (since 2024), a digital currency for buying digital goods in bots and Mini Apps;
• partnerships around its ecosystem, including the TON blockchain.

Telegram says it became profitable in 2024. According to figures shown to investors and reported by the Financial Times, revenue grew from about $343 million in 2023 to about $1.4 billion in 2024, with roughly $292 million from Premium, $250 million from advertising and about $700 million from "partnerships and ecosystem" (Finance Magnates). Growth continued in 2025: revenue for the first half was $870 million, up 65%, with an operating profit of almost $400 million. A fall in the value of Toncoin, which Telegram holds, turned that into a net loss of $222 million. In May 2025 Telegram raised about $1.7 billion in bonds, and about $500 million of its older bonds remain frozen in a Russian depository under Western sanctions (Finance Magnates, January 2026).

Since 2024, owners of public channels with at least 1,000 subscribers receive 50% of the ad revenue from their channels, paid in Toncoin (Telegram blog). That gave channel owners a direct reason to grow, and gave others a reason to fake growth (see how to check a channel's statistics).

Chats, groups and channels: what is the difference?

Chats are stored in Telegram's cloud, so one account works on several devices at once and your history follows you to a new phone. You can send files of up to 2 GB each (4 GB with Premium), edit and delete sent messages, and schedule messages for later.

Groups are shared conversations. Admins can set rules and slow-mode, split a large group into topics, and add anti-spam bots. Large public groups often serve as the community around a channel, a product or a city.

Channels are one-way feeds: admins post, subscribers read. Subscribers can't see each other and admins can post without revealing who they are. Every post shows a public view counter, and readers can react, forward posts and comment if the channel has a linked discussion group (Telegram: channels). Channels are what make Telegram a media platform: news outlets, politicians, companies, crypto projects and independent writers use them to reach readers directly, with no algorithmic feed in between.

• Public channels have an @username and a link like t.me/username. Anyone can open them, most also have a web preview at t.me/s/username, and their numbers can be measured. That is what TelegramInformer does for thousands of channels.
• Private channels are joined only through an invitation link.

What changed for channels in 2025 and 2026

Telegram ships updates every few weeks (Telegram blog). The changes that matter most for channels and their readers:

• Direct messages to channels (June 2025): readers can write to a channel privately, and owners can charge a fee per message (Telegram).
• Suggested posts (July 2025): anyone can propose a post to a channel and offer Telegram Stars or Toncoin for publishing it. The owner is paid 24 hours after posting, and the payment is returned if the post is deleted earlier (Telegram). In effect, a built-in market for paid posts.
• Public post search (July 2025): Premium users can search posts across all public channels, not only channel names (Telegram). Old posts can now find readers long after they were published.
• AI summaries (January 2026): long channel posts can be summarised in one tap, by open-source models running on Telegram's Cocoon network (Telegram).

Bots, Mini Apps and the crypto games

Bots are accounts run by programs. They answer commands, take payments, moderate groups and send alerts. Mini Apps are web apps that open inside Telegram: shops, tools and, most famously, games.

In 2024 "tap-to-earn" games built as Mini Apps spread across Telegram, promising crypto tokens for tapping and for subscribing to channels. The best known, Hamster Kombat, claimed more than 150 million players in June 2024, when its announcement channel had over 35 million subscribers (Decrypt).

The games faded, but they still shape Telegram's biggest channels. In our data in November 2026:

• Hamster Kombat's channel (@hamster_kombat) is the largest we track, with about 19.6 million subscribers: big, but around half of what it reported in mid-2024.
• Another game's channel, Blum (@blumcrypto), has about 12.7 million subscribers, yet a typical post is seen by about 0.25% of them within a day. Across ordinary channels the median is 5.6%. A subscriber count earned through game rewards says little about how many people read.
• Pavel Durov's own channel (@durov) grew from about 2.7 million subscribers in spring 2024 to a peak of 13.8 million in November 2024, the year of the games and of his arrest in France. It has slowly declined since, to about 10 million.

How private and secure is Telegram?

This is the most misunderstood part of Telegram, so it is worth being precise.

• Ordinary chats, groups and channels are not end-to-end encrypted. They are encrypted between your device and Telegram's servers and stored there, which is what lets them sync across devices. Telegram holds the keys, split across data centres in different jurisdictions (Telegram FAQ).
• Secret Chats are end-to-end encrypted: only the two devices in the chat can read them, they can self-destruct, they can't be forwarded and they are not stored in the cloud. They are one-to-one only, work only on the device where they were started, and must be switched on for each chat.
• Telegram's code is open source, and its apps support reproducible builds, so outsiders can check that the published code is what runs on your phone (Telegram FAQ).
• What Telegram can hand over. Telegram says it has disclosed "0 bytes of user messages" to third parties. After Pavel Durov was detained in France in August 2024, Telegram changed its privacy policy in September 2024: on a valid order from judicial authorities about a suspect in a criminal case, it may now disclose that user's IP address and phone number, and it lists such disclosures in transparency reports (Malwarebytes). France lifted Durov's travel restrictions in November 2025 (BeInCrypto via Yahoo News); in August 2026 he wrote that the investigation is still ongoing (Pavel Durov).
• Moderation. Telegram reviews public content with user reports, machine learning and, since 2024, AI tools. It reports more than 30 million groups and channels blocked in 2026 so far (Telegram moderation overview). Private chats are not moderated this way.

In practice: Telegram is a convenient cloud messenger with strong account controls, not the most private option. For sensitive conversations use a Secret Chat (or an app that encrypts everything end to end by default). For everyday safety, four settings matter most:

1. Two-step verification (Settings → Privacy and Security): a password on top of the SMS code. This blocks the most common way accounts are stolen.
2. Phone number privacy: set "Who can see my phone number" to Nobody and use a username instead.
3. Who can add me to groups and call me: limit both to your contacts to cut spam and scams.
4. Passkeys (Settings → Privacy and Security → Passkeys, since December 2025): log in with Face ID, a fingerprint or a PIN instead of an SMS code, which can't be intercepted (Telegram).

Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal compared

Sources: Telegram FAQ; WhatsApp's 1,024-member limit as reported by GSMArena; Signal's group limit on Signal Support.

The short version: WhatsApp and Signal are better for private conversations; Telegram is better for large communities, public channels and anything built with bots.

Telegram in Russia

Telegram is one of the most used apps in Russia, with nearly 90 million users there (The Record), and the place where much of Russian news and politics now happens. That has made it a target. In August 2025 the regulator, Roskomnadzor, restricted voice calls on Telegram and WhatsApp; in February 2026 it confirmed it was deliberately slowing Telegram down, while officials promote Max, a state-backed messenger (The Record, February 2026). From 20 March 2026 many Russian providers block Telegram outright (OONI); in April Durov said 65 million people in Russia still used it every day, most of them through VPNs (BeInCrypto via Yahoo News). More figures are in our Telegram statistics.

Russian is also by far the largest language of Telegram channels. TGStat, the largest catalog of Russian-language Telegram, lists about 1.72 million channels for Russia, with a combined audience of 5.7 billion subscriptions. Next come Uzbekistan (207,000 channels), Iran (127,000), Ukraine (113,000) and India (63,000) (TGStat, November 2026). Our own catalog started from English-language channels and still has few Russian ones; we are adding Russian-language channels throughout 2026 and 2027, and the Russian version of this site grows with them.

What Telegram's biggest channels tell you

Looking at the largest public channels we track says a lot about what Telegram is used for:

• Crypto games and their communities fill several of the top places (see above).
• Proxy channels, which share servers for reaching Telegram where it is blocked, are among the biggest: two of the eight largest channels we track are proxy lists, one of them in Persian. They are a measure of how many people use Telegram despite a block.
• Telegram's own channels, @telegram for news and @durov, each have around 9 to 10 million subscribers.
• By combined audience, cryptocurrencies is by far the largest category we track (about 109 million subscriptions in November 2026, mostly in the game channels), followed by politics and news and media, which have far more channels but smaller ones. See all categories.

The typical channel is far smaller than these: the median channel in our catalog has 1,569 subscribers. More figures, updated automatically, are in our Telegram statistics.

How to find good channels

Telegram's built-in search finds public channels by name, but it doesn't tell you which ones are worth following. Three checks help:

1. Look at readers, not subscribers. A channel whose posts reach a large share of its subscribers is one people actually read. Every channel page here shows this as ERR.
2. Check its history. Years of steady posting and growth are hard to fake.
3. See who cites it. Channels that other channels repost and mention are usually the ones worth reading.

Our top channels, categories and catalog by country show all three, and our guide on how to check a channel's statistics goes into detail.

Frequently asked questions

Is Telegram free? Yes. Messaging is free and Telegram says it will stay free; Telegram Premium is an optional paid subscription.

Who owns Telegram? Pavel Durov is its founder, owner and CEO (Telegram press page).

Is Telegram Russian? It was founded by Russian-born brothers, but the company has been based outside Russia since 2014 and is headquartered in Dubai.

Can people see my phone number? Only if your privacy settings allow it. You can hide it from everyone and use a username.

Is Telegram end-to-end encrypted? Only Secret Chats. Ordinary chats, groups and channels are encrypted in transit and stored on Telegram's servers.

Sources

Newest first. Figures from our own database are as of November 2026; figures in bold update automatically.

• Telegram moderation overview: groups and channels blocked in 2026 (read November 2026).
• Pavel Durov, August 2026: Telegram's 13th birthday and download ranking; on the French investigation.
• The Record, February 2026: Russia slows Telegram down.
• TGStat: channels per country (read November 2026).
• Finance Magnates, January 2026: first-half 2025 results, bonds.
• Telegram blog: AI summaries (January 2026), passkeys (December 2025), public post search (July 2025), suggested posts (July 2025), direct messages to channels (June 2025).
• BeInCrypto via Yahoo News, November 2025: France lifts Durov's travel restrictions.
• Telegram FAQ and press page: history, encryption, limits, business model, data requests, users.
• Telegram: channels and Sharing revenue with channel owners (2024).
• Finance Magnates: Financial Times figures for 2024.
• Malwarebytes, September 2024: the privacy policy change.
• Decrypt, June 2024: Hamster Kombat at its peak.
• GSMArena and Signal Support: group limits.
• TelegramInformer database: channel figures.