As of July 2024, cloud-based mobile messaging app Telegram reported 950 million monthly active users worldwide. Telegram is a chat app launched in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. The pair had previously founded the Russian social network VK, which they left when it was taken over by the Mail.ru Group. Telegram In 2023, the majority of Telegram’s global audience, was comprised by users aged between 25 and 34 years. Among the reasons to use Telegram, 80 percent of the platform’s users reported to “learn the majority of the news from Telegram.” After the announcement that WhatsApp was going to release a new privacy policy update was met with criticism in 2021, Telegram's audience and popularity spiked, bringing global downloads to 167 million. Telegram security criticism Despite claiming to be more secure than other mainstream messengers such as LINE or WhatsApp, Telegram has been frequently criticized by industry experts such as German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). One of the key points of criticism is Telegram’s failure to provide automatic end-to-end encryption (WhatsApp and LINE messenger have end-to-end encryption set up by default).

As of January 2025, monthly active users of Telegram accounted for over 11 percent of the global population, marking an increase from the previous year. In total, 950 million people used Telegram on average per month.

India was the leading market of Telegram by app downloads. Throughout 2024, Indian users installed the messaging app approximately 100 million times. Russia ranked second, with over 38.4 million downloads over the observed period, while U.S. users installed the app 38.2 million times. Brazil recorded the largest number of downloads among Latin American countries. France and Germany were the leading markets in Western Europe. Telegram usage in India Telegram had the fourth-highest penetration rate among social media platforms in India, following WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. In the third quarter of 2023, more than 58 percent of Indian active social media users reported having used Telegram over the past month. However, user engagement on Telegram in India was significantly lower than on other major networks. On average, Indian users spent 2.3 hours per month on the platform in 2021, which was 10 times shorter than on WhatsApp. Growing popularity of Telegram As of July 2024, Telegram had 950 million active users around the globe, having multiplied its audience tenfold since December 2014. Telegram recorded a sharp increase in global downloads in the first quarter of 2021, when WhatsApp, its competitor owned by Meta, updated its privacy policy. In March 2022, Telegram further increased its popularity in Russia after Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram were banned in the country. The number of daily active users (DAU) of Telegram nationwide grew by 15 percent between January and March 2022.

The number of daily active users (DAU) of WhatsApp in Russia decreased slightly between September and October 2022. From October 1 to October 25, 2022, the messaging app counted 73.5 million active users daily. By comparison, the audience of Telegram saw an increase to 46.7 million users.

Between the end of January and mid-March, 2022, the number of daily active users (DAU) of Signal in Ukraine increased by 184 percent. By comparison, Signal DAU in Russia increased by 81 percent during the same period. While Telegram amassed over 950 thousand downloads from users in Ukraine between the end of February and March 20, 2022, the app saw an increase of approximately nine percent DAU in the examined period.

India was Telegram's largest market as of 2022. Between January and April of that year, the average number of monthly active users of that messaging app in India stood at nearly 87 million. Furthermore, nearly 16 million people in Brazil used Telegram on average per month. MAU of Telegram in the United States was close to 11 million over the course of 2022.

The messenger app Telegram had around five million paying users around the world as of January 2024, one million more than in the previous month. Telegram introduced a freemium model with paid subscriptions in June 2022.

TeleScope is an extensive dataset suite that comprises metadata for about 500K Telegram channels and downloaded message metadata from all 71K public channels within this 500k channels accounting for about 120M crawled messages. In addition to metadata, TeleScope suite provides enrichments like language detection and active periods for each channel and telegram entity extracted from messages. It also comprises channel connections and user interaction data built using Telegram’s message-forwarding feature to study multiple use cases including information spread and message-forwarding patterns. The dataset is designed for diverse applications, independent of specific research objectives, and sufficiently versatile to facilitate the replication of social media studies comparable to those conducted on platforms like X (former Twitter).

Further information on the content of the files can be found in the file TeleScope_readme_v1-0-0.txt (see 'Technical Report').

keywords: Computational Social Science; Information Science, Web and Social Media; text analysis; text processing; text communication; social media; Online discourse; Information Dissemination; Information Analysis

More than three-quarters of the Russian online population aged 16 years and older used the Telegram messenger, thus making it the most-used social media platform among those listed in the ranking. WhatsApp ranked second, with a penetration rate of nearly 74 percent, followed by VK and TikTok. Social media usage in Russia In 2024, the daily time spent on social media in Russia was recorded at roughly two hours and 20 minutes per user on average. After Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) were blocked in Russia at the end of February and the beginning of March 2022, a significant increase in activity was recorded on VK and Telegram. For example, the daily audience on VK increased by almost nine percent, while the number of friends requests and feed views grew by 250 percent and 25 percent, respectively. YouTube From the global perspective, YouTube ranked second after Facebook, which remained the leading social media platform with about three billion active users. The U.S.-based channel MrBeast had the highest number of subscribers on YouTube with around 343 million as of January 2025. India-based T-Series followed with 284 million subscribers as of that month.

During the third quarter of 2024, Telegram was downloaded approximately 760,000 times through the Apple App Store and almost 1.3 million times on the Google Play Store by users in France. Telegram experienced a peak in downloads from both Android and iOS devices in January 2021, due to users' negative reception of the WhatsApp privacy policy update released globally during that month. During the second quarter of 2022 Telegram users increased to 700 million monthly active worldwide, as the platform launched its first direct monetization program.

Despite announcing a controversial privacy policy update in January 2021, WhatsApp has not seen a prolonged and drastic slow down in its daily active user growth. In August 2021, the leading mobile messaging app was reporting more than four percent DAU growth compared to January 2021. By comparison, both Telegram and Signal reported losing daily active users, with Signal counting a loss of more than 60 percent in its DAU compared to January.

How high is the brand awareness of Telegram in the United States?When it comes to messenger users, brand awareness of Telegram is at 53 percent in the United States. The survey was conducted using the concept of aided brand recognition, showing respondents both the brand's logo and the written brand name.How popular is Telegram in the United States?In total, 16 percent of U.S. messenger users say they like Telegram. However, in actuality, among the 53 percent of U.S. respondents who know Telegram, 30 percent of people like the brand.What is the usage share of Telegram in the United States?All in all, 13 percent of messenger users in the United States use Telegram. That means, of the 53 percent who know the brand, 25 percent use them.How loyal are the users of Telegram?Around 10 percent of messenger users in the United States say they are likely to use Telegram again. Set in relation to the 13 percent usage share of the brand, this means that 77 percent of their users show loyalty to the brand.What's the buzz around Telegram in the United States?In February 2024, about 11 percent of U.S. messenger users had heard about Telegram in the media, on social media, or in advertising over the past three months. Of the 53 percent who know the brand, that's 21 percent, meaning at the time of the survey there's little buzz around Telegram in the United States.If you want to compare brands, do deep-dives by survey items of your choice, filter by total online population or users of a certain brand, or drill down on your very own hand-tailored target groups, our Consumer Insights Brand KPI survey has you covered.

Online messaging app Telegram has increased in popularity in recent years surpassing Twitter and Snapchat by the number of active monthly users in late 2020. The messenger has also been crucial to protest movements in several countries in 2019-2020, including Belarus, Russia and Hong Kong. Yet, to date only few studies examined online activities on Telegram and none have analyzed the platform with regard to the protest mobilization. In the present study, we address the existing gap by examining Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. With this paper we aim to provide an example of methodological tools that can be used to study protest mobilization and coordination on Telegram. We also contribute to the research on computational text analysis in Cantonese - one of the low-resource Asian languages, - as well as to the scholarship on Hong Kong protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization in general. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders - those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, - such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.

During a survey conducted in early 2023, 21 percent of respondents who had Telegram installed on their phones said they used the app every day, down from 25 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, 23 percent of interviewees used Telegram a few times per week. The number of Telegram users worldwide more than doubled between 2018 and 2022.

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As of February 2025, two billion users were accessing the WhatsApp messenger on a monthly basis. The app’s reach in usage penetration is particularly strong in markets outside the United States, and it is one of the most popular mobile social apps worldwide. WeChat amassed over 1.38 billion users, and Facebook Messenger amassed around 947 million users worldwide. Instant messaging is a type of online chat which offers real-time text transmission via internet. Since the appearance of the smartphone and the subsequent explosion of mobile apps, low-cost or free chat and social messaging apps have proven themselves as a cheap alternative to operator-based text messaging via SMS. Many messenger apps offer features such as group chats, the exchange of graphics, video and even audio messages as well as stickers or emoticons.

In 2022, WhatsApp was the chat and communication app most used on daily basis among Android users, with 1.35 billion monthly active users (MAU). Facebook messenger ranked second, with over 763 million MAU, while Telegram counted 412 million users active on monthly basis. Chat and VoIP communication app Line saw 65 million monthly active users mainly in its Asian market.

The most popular messenger application in Russia in August 2021 was WhatsApp, with an audience of nearly 77 million. Telegram, which was unblocked by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media of Russia (Roskomnadzor) in June 2020, ranked second with around 38 million users visiting it at least once a month. Viber was placed third with approximately 34.8 million users.

According to a 2024 survey, around 39 percent of Telegram users in Brazil lived in large cities, with populations between 100 thousand and one million inhabitants. Another 22 percent of the social platform users lived in megacities with over 5 million inhabitants, while medium-sized municipalities concentrated around 14 percent of users. Overall, cities with populations over 1 million accounted for 17 percent of the app user base in the country.

During a 2023 survey fielded in Brazil, 67 percent of Telegram monthly active users said the solution was suitable to contact brands and companies through the mobile app to ask them questions and receive special offers. About 62 of the respondents stated that Telegram was fitting for getting technical support in or through the platform.