Telegram statistics 2026: users, channels, money and audiences
The Telegram numbers that hold up in 2026, each with its source and date: users and growth, 11.3 million channels and 34 billion subscriptions, how Telegram compares with other apps, revenue, ads, Mini Apps, Gifts, fake subscribers, who reads Telegram and what they trust, Russia's block, plus live data from the channels we track.
By Pavel Ufimtsev
Updated
On this page
- Key numbers
- Users: from 100 million to a billion
- How Telegram compares with other apps
- Channels: 11.3 million and growing
- Where the channels are: countries
- Russia: Telegram's biggest market, now blocked
- Who reads Telegram, and what they trust
- Money: revenue, Premium and creators
- Advertising on Telegram
- Fake subscribers
- Bots, Mini Apps and the end of tap-to-earn
- Telegram Gifts
- Moderation and safety
- What our channel data shows
- About the sources
- Sources
Telegram publishes few numbers, and most "Telegram statistics" pages repeat estimates without saying where they came from. This page brings together the figures that can be traced to a source: Telegram and Pavel Durov, investor documents reported by the Financial Times, DataReportal's Digital 2026 report, the channel analytics services Telemetr and TGStat, audience measurement in Russia, and large surveys of Telegram readers, channel owners and advertisers. Every figure has a date and a source, and every chart has its numbers in a table under "Show data".
Key numbers
| Figure | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | More than 1 billion | March 2025 | Telegram |
| Channels | 11.3 million (1.7 million in 2020) | October 2025 | Telemetr |
| Subscriptions across all channels | 34.1 billion, up 20% in a year | October 2025 | Telemetr |
| Channels with 1 million+ subscribers | 3,298 | October 2025 | Telemetr |
| Rank among the most used social platforms | 7th, used monthly by 33.8% of internet users 16+ | Q2 2025 | GWI via DataReportal |
| Times opened per day by its users | 9.9, 4th after WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok | August 2025 | Similarweb via DataReportal |
| Revenue | $1.4 billion in 2024; $870 million in the first half of 2025 | 2024, H1 2025 | Financial Times via Finance Magnates |
| Premium subscribers | About 15 million | May 2025 | Pavel Durov |
| Spending on Telegram Ads in TON | About 46.6 million TON (~$184 million) since April 2024 | October 2025 | Telemetr, from the TON blockchain |
| Telegram Gifts traded | $279 million in total trading volume | October 2025 | Telemetr, from Dune |
| Channels showing signs of fake subscribers | 198,979 (1.76%) | October 2025 | Telemetr |
| Groups and channels blocked by Telegram | More than 30 million in 2026 | November 2026 | Telegram |
Two numbers you will often see are missing on purpose: daily active users and users by country. Telegram has never published either, and the circulating figures don't explain how they were made.
Users: from 100 million to a billion
User counts are announced by Telegram itself and the method isn't published. These are the milestones we could trace to their source:
Show data
| Date | Monthly active users (millions) |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 100 |
| 2018 | 200 |
| 2020 | 400 |
| 2022 | 700 |
| 2024 | 950 |
| 2025 | 1,000 |
Sources: February 2016, March 2018, April 2020, June 2022, July 2024, March 2025. Since then Durov has described the audience only as "a billion+".
Telegram is also one of the most installed apps: Sensor Tower ranked it 9th worldwide by downloads in 2025 (DesignRush), and in August 2026 Durov wrote that it had been in the top 10 for 7.5 years (Pavel Durov).
How Telegram compares with other apps
DataReportal's Digital 2026 report (October 2025) measures platforms in two ways: what people say they use (GWI's survey of internet users aged 16 and over) and what their phones actually open (Similarweb's Android app data). Telegram's profile is distinctive: fewer people than the giants, but opened almost as often as TikTok, in short visits.
Show data
| Platform | Used monthly |
|---|---|
| 56.9% | |
| YouTube | 55.4% |
| 55.1% | |
| 54.0% | |
| Messenger | 38.4% |
| TikTok | 36.0% |
| Telegram | 33.8% |
| X | 29.2% |
| 25.1% | |
| 25.0% | |
| Snapchat | 23.2% |
| 21.3% |
Show data
| App | Opens per day |
|---|---|
| 20.7 | |
| 12.3 | |
| TikTok | 10.0 |
| Telegram | 9.9 |
| 9.1 | |
| Messenger | 9.1 |
| Discord | 7.3 |
| X | 6.8 |
| Snapchat | 6.5 |
| YouTube | 5.9 |
- Time spent: a Telegram user spends about 30 minutes a day in the app, against 1 hour 37 minutes on TikTok and 59 minutes on WhatsApp. Each visit lasts about 3 minutes: people check Telegram often and briefly, the way they check news.
- Active app users: on Similarweb's index of monthly app users (YouTube = 100), Telegram scores 27.3, 8th, just behind Snapchat.
- Favourite platform: 2.5% of social media users name Telegram as their favourite, 8th worldwide; men and younger users slightly more often.
Channels: 11.3 million and growing
Channels are what set Telegram apart, and their number has grown sixfold in five years. More than 2 million new channels were created each year from 2021 to 2024 (Telemetr, October 2025):
Show data
| Year | Channels |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 23.4K |
| 2016 | 84.3K |
| 2017 | 237.9K |
| 2018 | 448.1K |
| 2019 | 789.7K |
| 2020 | 1.7M |
| 2021 | 3.6M |
| 2022 | 5.6M |
| 2023 | 7.8M |
| 2024 | 10.1M |
| 2025 | 11.3M |
The combined subscriber count of all channels grew from 8.6 billion in 2021 to 34.1 billion in 2025. Growth is slowing (+56% in 2022, +20% in 2025) but still positive:
Show data
| Year | Subscriptions (billions) |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 8.62 |
| 2022 | 13.40 |
| 2023 | 20.08 |
| 2024 | 28.46 |
| 2025 | 34.14 |
Giant channels are multiplying. Channels with a million or more subscribers went from 805 in 2021 to 3,298 in 2025; channels with 10 million or more from 2 in 2023 to 31. Telegram News was the first to reach 5 million (December 2020), Telegram Tips the first to 10 million (December 2023), and Hamster Kombat's channel reached 20 million in May 2024 and 30 million a month later. In 2025, 1,538 channels gained more than 1,000 subscribers a day, twice as many as in 2023 (Telemetr; fraud-free channels only).
Posting is up too: channels publish about 773 million posts a month, 31% more than at the start of 2024. Thursday and Friday are the busiest days; on Saturday channels post about half as much.
What the channels are about
The largest categories by combined subscriptions, with the change over the last year (Telemetr, October 2025):
Show data
| Category | Subscriptions | Change in a year |
|---|---|---|
| Adult | 1.98B | −223.3M |
| Cryptocurrencies | 1.56B | −616.2M |
| Bets & casino | 1.47B | −286.6M |
| Movies | 1.38B | −7.0M |
| News & media | 1.29B | +233.9M |
| Education | 1.07B | +75.7M |
| Economy & finance | 864.5M | −80.0M |
| Technology & apps | 779.1M | +68.2M |
| Games | 711.4M | −97.0M |
| Business | 529.7M | −80.1M |
| Religion | 525.6M | −49.7M |
| Music | 450.9M | +13.4M |
The story of the year is in the last column: crypto lost 616 million subscriptions and games 97 million as the 2024 tap-to-earn boom faded (crypto had grown 233% in 2024), while news and media gained 234 million, more than any other category. The readers who stay are reading news.
Where the channels are: countries
TGStat, the largest catalog of Russian-language Telegram, counts channels by country. Russian-language Telegram is by far the largest: Russia alone has eight times more channels than the next country.
Show data
| Country | Channels | Combined audience |
|---|---|---|
| Russia | 1,716,000 | 5.72 billion |
| Uzbekistan | 207,000 | 1.16 billion |
| Iran | 127,000 | 2.15 billion |
| Ukraine | 113,000 | 524 million |
| India | 63,000 | 1.40 billion |
| China | 53,000 | 872 million |
| Kazakhstan | 20,000 | 72 million |
| Belarus | 16,000 | 40 million |
| Ethiopia | 16,000 | 172 million |
Iran stands out: 127,000 channels with more than 2 billion combined subscriptions, despite Telegram being blocked there since 2018. In Ukraine, Telemetr counts 127,000 channels whose combined audience grew from 64 million in 2021 to 433 million in 2025 (Telemetr's forecast for the full year), nearly sevenfold.
Russia: Telegram's biggest market, now blocked
After Instagram and Facebook were blocked in 2022, Telegram became Russia's main news platform. Mediascope's measure of average daily reach, people aged 12 and older (Re:Russia, April 2026):
Show data
| Period | Daily reach |
|---|---|
| Jan 2022 | 23% |
| Mar 2022 | 33% |
| Dec 2023 | 47% |
| Dec 2024 | 52% |
| Dec 2025 | 60% |
| Feb 2026 | 65% |
About 94 million people in Russia used Telegram monthly at the start of 2026. Then the state moved against it: calls were restricted in August 2025; on 10 February 2026 the regulator confirmed it was slowing Telegram down while promoting the state messenger Max (The Record); from 20 March 2026 many providers block it outright (OONI). In April Durov said 65 million people in Russia still used Telegram daily, mostly through VPNs (BeInCrypto via Yahoo News). Russia's biggest channels show it: three of the top 25 by subscribers on TGStat distribute VPNs or modified TikTok apps, and they have some of the highest reach.
Who reads Telegram, and what they trust
The largest surveys of Telegram readers come from its two biggest markets: TGStat's 2023 research among Russian-language readers (50,000+ respondents, plus 15,000 channel owners and 800 advertisers) and Telemetr's November 2025 survey in Ukraine. They describe an audience that is older, more educated and more trusting of Telegram than the stereotype suggests.
- Age: in the TGStat survey 45% of readers were 35 or older (up from 40% two years earlier); in Ukraine 48% are 18–37 and 30% are 38–54.
- Gender: 58% men in the Russian-language survey (67% in 2019); 55% men in Ukraine.
- Education: 62% have higher education (TGStat); 55% in Ukraine.
- Work: Telegram is also an office tool: 52% of Russian-language respondents used it for work chats, and 72% of Ukrainians use it for team communication, ahead of Zoom (21%) and WhatsApp (19%).
Telegram is where people get their news, and where they trust it. 80% of Russian-language readers get most of their news from Telegram, and 85% read news channels. Asked which sources they trust most:
Show data
| Source | Trust it most |
|---|---|
| Telegram channels | 79.4% |
| YouTube | 31.0% |
| Online media | 27.8% |
| Friends and contacts | 22.8% |
| 16.0% | |
| 13.4% | |
| Television | 13.2% |
| TikTok | 9.3% |
The TGStat survey found the same: Telegram channels were the most trusted news source for 68% of Russian-language readers, far ahead of media websites (30%) and TV (8%). Trust goes to people and track records, not anonymity: 73% trust specific named authors, and only 7% trust anonymous channels; in Ukraine 46% trust official channels and 34% channels that have "stood the test of time", against 1% for anonymous ones.
People follow far more channels than they read. A quarter of Russian-language readers subscribe to more than 50 channels, but three quarters read 15 or fewer. 41% keep notifications off for every channel, and more than half archive channels to hide them. This is why reach (how many subscribers see a post) matters more than subscriber counts.
Money: revenue, Premium and creators
| Period | Revenue | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | About $343 million | Loss of $173 million |
| 2024 | About $1.4 billion | Net profit of $540 million |
| First half of 2025 | $870 million, up 65% | Operating profit of almost $400 million; net loss of $222 million after a Toncoin write-down |
Sources: Financial Times figures via Finance Magnates and Finance Magnates. In 2024 about $292 million came from Premium, $250 million from advertising and $700 million from "partnerships and ecosystem". These are unaudited figures shown to investors.
Premium reached about 15 million subscribers in May 2025 (Pavel Durov), roughly one user in 70. Among Russian-language readers the most valued Premium feature is voice-to-text (66%), ahead of removing ads (64%); 70% of non-subscribers say they don't see the value.
Channel owners are paid more and more. Since 2024 Telegram shares half of its ad revenue with public channels of 1,000+ subscribers. By October 2025 those payouts had passed 12.8 million TON (about $38.6 million), and monthly payouts grew more than 3.5 times during 2025 (Telemetr, from the TON blockchain). They are concentrated: the 10 biggest recipients earned about $2.45 million between them. Most creators earn far less: in TGStat's survey 40% of channel owners selling ads made under 5,000 roubles (about $60) a month, and 4% more than 500,000.
Advertising on Telegram
Two markets run side by side: ads bought directly from channel owners (the traditional way) and Telegram Ads, Telegram's own ad platform, which shares revenue with channels.
- Native ads are booming: the number of native ad posts in channels grew 457%, from 3.95 million to 22 million, and their views doubled in 2025 (Telemetr). They are published mostly Monday to Wednesday.
- Telegram Ads is scaling: from January to October 2025 the number of advertisers grew from 33,218 to 129,318, creatives from 158,000 to 1.03 million, and channels showing the ads from 877,000 to 1.57 million, about 65% of the 2.4 million public channels with 1,000+ subscribers. Advertisers have spent about 46.6 million TON (around $184 million) through TON-funded accounts since April 2024; 0.6% of them account for about 60% of the spending.
- Who buys: in TGStat's advertiser survey 95% had bought ads from channel owners and 27% had tried Telegram Ads. Their biggest problems: results are hard to predict (69%) and the risk of buying ads in channels with fake subscribers (61%). 56% check channels for fake subscribers before buying, and 75% study their statistics in analytics services.
- What it delivers: 58% of advertisers found Telegram ads about as effective as other channels, 16% more effective and 26% less.
Fake subscribers
Telemetr flags 198,979 channels (1.76%) with signs of bought subscribers, 120,319 more than a year earlier. The share is highest where money is:
Show data
| Category | Channels with fake subscribers |
|---|---|
| Bets & casino | 16.8% |
| Economy & finance | 15.7% |
| Cryptocurrencies | 14.9% |
| News & media | 7.3% |
| Career | 7.0% |
| Business | 6.1% |
| Marketing & PR | 5.4% |
| Sports | 5.0% |
Channel owners admit it too: in TGStat's survey 22% of owners who sell ads said they had bought subscribers, and 27% said bots had been added to their channel against their will. How to check a channel yourself is in our guide to checking a channel's real statistics.
Bots, Mini Apps and the end of tap-to-earn
Telemetr tracks bots and Mini Apps with 10,000+ monthly users. Combined, they reached 1.41 billion monthly users in January 2025, then the tap-to-earn games collapsed: Mini App users fell by more than two thirds while ordinary bots kept growing.
Show data
| Month | Bots | Mini Apps |
|---|---|---|
| Jan | 705 | 705 |
| Feb | 722 | 544 |
| Mar | 762 | 369 |
| Apr | 784 | 324 |
| May | 825 | 273 |
| Jun | 838 | 250 |
| Jul | 864 | 230 |
| Aug | 858 | 216 |
| Sep | 876 | 204 |
- Games and crypto Mini Apps lost 199 million and 316 million monthly users from their peak. Hamster Kombat, which claimed more than 150 million players in June 2024, had 2.8 million monthly users in October 2025.
- Developers keep building: bots with 10,000+ users grew from 9,297 to 58,482 in 2025, and Mini Apps from 2,388 to 8,923.
- Revenue moved to Gifts: bots and Mini Apps earned about 24.8 billion Stars (about $322 million) from January to October 2025. In October, 55% of that revenue came from gift bots, 9% from Telegram utilities, 8.5% each from crypto and betting, and 5.6% from games.
Telegram Gifts
Collectible gifts, bought with Stars and tradable as NFTs on the TON blockchain, became Telegram's surprise market of 2025 (Telemetr, from Dune data, October 2025):
- $77 million in primary sales and $279 million in total trading volume across 102 collections; the busiest day, 9 June 2025, saw $31 million in trades.
- Wallets that traded gifts grew from about 22,000 in January 2025 to 475,000 in November; 68% of them were created in 2025.
- The most valuable collection, Plush Pepe, was worth about $34 million, up 399%.
- Readers send gifts to channels too: 345,800 channels received at least one gift by October 2025, from 580,800 users, worth 2.6 billion Stars.
Moderation and safety
Telegram moderates 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, including about 489,000 for child abuse material and 199,000 for terrorism (Telegram); for 2025 it reported about 44 million (Tech.az). Since September 2024 Telegram may disclose a suspect's IP address and phone number on a valid judicial order (Malwarebytes).
What our channel data shows
TelegramInformer collects daily statistics on public channels: subscribers, posts, views, reactions and reposts. Today our catalog covers 14,451 channels: a sample that started with English-language and political channels, which we are expanding through 2026 and 2027, with Russian-language channels a priority. It already shows how channel audiences behave. These figures update automatically; the data was last refreshed on November 12, 2026.
- The 51 channels with a million or more subscribers hold 63% of the combined audience. 83% of channels have fewer than 10,000 subscribers; the median channel has 1,569.
- A typical post is seen by 5.6% of a channel's subscribers within a day (median ERR, channels with 1,000+ subscribers). For channels with a million or more subscribers it is 0.4%.
- Over the last 30 days, 16% of channels gained subscribers and 81% lost them.
| Subscribers | Channels | Share of channels | Combined audience | Share of audience | Median ERR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1,000 | 5,625 | 38.9% | 2.3M | 0.7% | – |
| 1,000–10,000 | 6,404 | 44.3% | 21.6M | 6.1% | 5.9% |
| 10,000–100,000 | 2,166 | 15% | 60.3M | 17% | 5.2% |
| 100,000–1 million | 205 | 1.4% | 49.1M | 13.8% | 5.6% |
| 1 million or more | 51 | 0.4% | 222.4M | 62.5% | 0.4% |
Subscribers are not readers: the giants reach far fewer of their subscribers (0.4%) than channels with 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers (5.2%). Many were built by games and giveaways, and those subscribers no longer read. The survey findings above say the same from the reader's side: people follow many channels and read few.
| Category | Channels | Combined audience | Median ERR | Growing over 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Politics | 2,517 | 19.8M | 5.1% | 8% |
| Religion & Spirituality | 1,303 | 6.3M | 6.3% | 21% |
| Cryptocurrencies | 1,259 | 108.9M | 3.2% | 5% |
| News & Media | 1,044 | 14.3M | 4.9% | 11% |
| Humor & Entertainment | 545 | 4.2M | 9.9% | 24% |
| Economics & Finance | 531 | 4.7M | 5.4% | 11% |
| Health | 477 | 3.7M | 3.7% | 23% |
| Betting | 373 | 2.9M | 3.6% | 22% |
| Music | 368 | 845.6K | 7.9% | 26% |
| Videos & Movies | 362 | 2.3M | 3.5% | 22% |
| Technology | 343 | 4.2M | 3.7% | 34% |
| Education | 278 | 2.2M | 4.3% | 18% |
How every figure is calculated is on the methodology page.
About the sources
- Telemetr (telemetr.io) and TGStat (tgstat.com) are analytics services that index public Telegram channels; their counts depend on what they can see and how they classify channels. Telemetr's Telegram Market Report 2025 uses data to October 2025 and includes surveys of Ukrainian users, channel owners and advertisers (17–24 November 2025). TGStat's Telegram Research 2023 surveyed more than 50,000 Russian-language readers between 29 March and 12 April 2023.
- DataReportal Digital 2026 (published 15 October 2025, with Meltwater and We Are Social) draws on GWI's survey of internet users aged 16+ and Similarweb's Android app data.
- Financial Times figures are unaudited numbers shown to investors; Telegram doesn't publish financial statements.
- Surveys describe the people who answered them: mostly active, engaged users of the channels that shared the survey.
You can quote any figure on this page with a link to it; please include its date.
Sources
- Telegram moderation overview, TGStat: read November 2026.
- Pavel Durov: August 2026, user and Premium milestones.
- Re:Russia, April 2026: Mediascope figures for Russia.
- BeInCrypto via Yahoo News, April 2026; OONI, March 2026; The Record, February 2026: the block in Russia.
- Finance Magnates, January 2026 and Finance Magnates: Financial Times figures.
- Telemetr, Telegram Market Report 2025 (telemetr.io): channels, categories, fake subscribers, creator payouts, ads, bots and Mini Apps, Gifts, Ukraine.
- DataReportal, Digital 2026 Global Overview Report, October 2025: GWI and Similarweb platform data.
- Sensor Tower, via DesignRush: most downloaded apps of 2025.
- Tech.az: moderation in 2025.
- TGStat, Telegram Research 2023: readers, channel owners and advertisers.
- Malwarebytes, September 2024.
- Telegram blog and press page: 400 million, 700 million, press.
- TelegramInformer database: all figures in "What our channel data shows", live.