Hamster Kombat Announcement (@hamster_kombat) was the most-subscribed channel on the messaging platform Telegram, with around 43 million followers as of February 25, 2025. It is a Telegram-based game connected to the blockchain Hamster Network. Blum, a cryptocurrency trading app, ranked second with over 30 million subscribers. Selling and buying Telegram usernames Starting from end-October 2022, Telegram allowed its users to sell and buy usernames using the auction platform Fragment that used the cryptocurrency Toncoin (TON) for payments. As of February 2025, the most expensive username sold was @news. Its price stood at 994 thousand TON, or around 2.4 million U.S. dollars based on an exchange rate of 1 TON = 2.4 U.S. dollars as of December 2022). In total, as of November 30, 2022, Telegram usernames worth 50 million U.S. dollars were sold worldwide, as stated by Telegram’s owner Pavel Durov. Most popular Telegram channels in Russia In Russia, where Telegram originated, the most-subscribed Telegram channel is Meta Silense TON. As of February 2025, it had approximately 5.5 million followers. Besides the audience, performance of Telegram channels can be measured by views, reactions, and shares. In terms of average views per post, the leading channel in January 2025 belonged to Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia.

News channels were the most popular channel type on Telegram as of 2023, followed by 85 percent of app users. Channels with a focus on entertainment and education were read by 62 percent and 58 percent of users, respectively.

Топор+ (Topor+) had the largest average weekly share among Telegram channels in Russia, at *** percent of the population in the first quarter of 2025. The channel of RIA Novosti, a news outlet, ranked third.

The largest share of Telegram channel administrators as of 2021 was between 25 and 34 years of age, exceeding ** percent. Channel administrators who were younger than 24 years in this messaging app accounted for ** percent.

As of February 2025, the most-subscribed Telegram channel from Russia was Meta Silense TON, a cryptocurrency channel, with around *** million followers. The fifth-most subscribed channel was Topor Live ("Топор Live"), a private news channel.

The highest share of Telegram channel administrators placed ads on their channels several times per week in 2023. Approximately *********** of channel administrators would place ads *** or *** times per month.

"TikTok Updates" (@tiktokupdatez) was the leading Telegram channel about software and apps in Russia as of August 2025, with nearly *** million subscribers. The second-most popular channel was "TikTokModCloud" (@TikTokModCloud).

Approximately 41 percent of channel administrators on Telegram profiting from placing advertisements on the platform, earned up to five thousand Russian rubles per month, as of 2022. Over 15 percent of administrators received between six and 15 thousand Russian rubles from ads on their channels per month.

Nearly ** percent of Telegram channel users were aged between 35 and 44 years, according to a survey conducted in September 2022. Furthermore, around one quarter of the users were at least 45 years old.

The channel of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Russia's Chechen Republic, was the most-followed political channel on Telegram in the country, with approximately two million subscribers as of May 26, 2025. The channel of the journalist Vladimir Soloviev ranked sixth with around 1.3 million followers.

The Telegram channel of Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia and the country's former president, had the most views per post on average in Russia in January 2025, at approximately *** million. The channel of Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the Russian State Duma, ranked fourth. How do Telegram channels work? Besides one-to-one and group chats, Telegram offers users an option to post messages publicly on their own channels, which their subscribers can follow. Channels can be used for sharing information, as sales platforms, or to conduct polls, among other purposes. For example, Topor Live, one of the most-subscribed Telegram channels in Russia, operates as a news platform. Telegram channels can be managed anonymously, which can make it difficult for authorities to identify the authors. Telegram usage in Russia since the war in Ukraine After Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram were blocked in Russia in February and March 2022, social media users switched to other networks, such as Telegram and VK. In the first month of the ban, Telegram’s Russian-speaking audience increased by ** percent. Telegram was among the most-downloaded apps in the country in March 2022. Over ** million Russian users accessed Telegram on average daily in August 2022.

In March 2022, Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro had most-subscribed Telegram channel in Brazil (Jair M. Bolsonaro 1) with around 1.23 million subscribers in the platform. The official channel for tips on Telegram followed in second place with around half the number of the followers of the president's channel. Telegram is used by more than 67 percent of Brazilians for exchanging text messages and accessing channels, the last as an exclusive feature to the app when compared to other messengers in Brazil.

Challenging Meta's hegemony Although WhatsApp is used by more than 90 percent of Brazilian internet users, Telegram is now present on 60 percent of the smartphones in the country, turning it into a direct competitor against the Meta-owned messenger and other platforms. Used by around 55 percent of the Brazil's internet users, Telegram generated around 6.6 million downloads in Brazil during the second quarter of 2022, one of the highest download figures registered after a peak of 12.8 million downloads in the first quarter of 2021.

Elections and disinformation After a court order from the Brazilian Supreme Court that almost suspended the app, Telegram has stated that would monitor its 100 biggest channels to combat the spread of fake news during the general elections in the country. Although the list was kept under investigation secrecy, the platform informed that these channels represent more than 95 percent of all the views in the country.

With the turmoil expected for the upcoming general election in Brazil in October 2022, around 81 percent of respondents of a March 2022 survey in Brazil claimed that social media platforms and messaging apps should remove fake news content, while more than half of those agreed that messaging apps should be taken down if they disobeyed a court order to avoid the spread of such content. The polarized political atmosphere in Brazil also made users of several social media stop talking about politics on these platforms.

Approximately 40 percent of Telegram channel administrators started their activity in the year prior to the survey conducted in 2023. Over one quarter of channel administrators had more than two years of experience at that time.

Four out of ten Telegram channel users reported earning less than ** thousand Russian rubles per month, according to a survey conducted in September 2022. Furthermore, approximately ********* of respondents had a monthly income ranging from ** thousand to ** thousand Russian rubles.

According to a report conducted in 2022, Telegram posts that mentioned "nuclear" generated more reactions than average. In September 2022, posts containing the term on Anti-war and neutral Telegram channels saw an increase in reactions of 38.95 percent when compared to an average post. Additionally, in September 2022, posts on Pro-Russian Telegram channels in Ukraine containing "nuclear" saw an increase in reactions of 29.44 percent.

Knygy ukrainskoyu (Книги українською) was the leading Telegram channel about books and reading in Ukraine in 2020, with over *** thousand interactions as of 2020. A slightly lower number of contacts with the audience was recorded for Nepozbuvny knygochytun (Непозбувний книгочитун).

As of March 2025, cloud-based mobile messaging app Telegram reported over *********** 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 of users aged between 25 and 34 years. Among the reasons to use Telegram, ** 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 *** 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).

The messenger app Telegram had ** million paying users around the world as of December 2024, seven million more than in January of that year. Telegram introduced a freemium model with paid subscriptions in June 2022.

The messenger app Telegram was downloaded ***** million times worldwide in April 2025. The monthly number of downloads saw an increase from the previous month. Over the observed period, the downloads peaked at over ** million in January 2021. The surge was explained by a privacy policy update of WhatsApp, a competitor of Telegram.

Men represented the largest share of Telegram users worldwide, according to data from the fourth quarter of 2024, at **** percent of all female and male users. To compare, the share of female audience of Snapchat stood at around ** percent.