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 **** million downloads over the observed period, while U.S. users installed the app **** 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 ** 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 *** hours per month on the platform in 2021, which was ** times shorter than on WhatsApp. Growing popularity of Telegram As of July 2024, Telegram had *** 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 ** percent between January and March 2022.

Russia had the largest share of internet users aged 16 to 64 years who used Telegram among European countries, at **** percent in the third quarter of 2024. In Turkey recorded a usage rate of **** percent.

Nigeria had the largest share of internet users aged 16 to 64 years who used Telegram among presented African countries, at approximately 54 percent in the third quarter of 2022. Closely following was Egypt, where the penetration rate of Telegram reached nearly 53 percent.

In the third quarter of 2023, messaging app Telegram registered 7.24 million downloads in the United States and another 5.8 million downloads in Brazil, the service's two biggest markets in the Americas. Recently, downloads of the messaging app have experienced an upward trend in all the examined regions of the world, with around 24.38 million solely in the Americas during the same period.

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O arquivo channels_news_media_br_telemetrio_2024-12-10.xlsx contém os de canais públicos de Telegram listados no Telemet.io, classificados na categoria "News Media" e filtrados por país (Brasil).

A lista contém 336 canais e foi criada no dia 10 de dezembro de 2024. O arquivo contém o nome de usuário (channel-username) dos canais e os metadados:

• channel-name_title
• subscribers
• growth
• post-views

As informações foram obtidas no Telemet.io.

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.

Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than three billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four of the biggest social media platforms, all with more than one billion monthly active users each: Facebook (core platform), WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook reported around four billion monthly core Family product users. The United States and China account for the most high-profile social platforms Most top ranked social networks with more than 100 million users originated in the United States, but services like Chinese social networks WeChat, QQ or video sharing app Douyin have also garnered mainstream appeal in their respective regions due to local context and content. Douyin’s popularity has led to the platform releasing an international version of its network: a little app called TikTok. How many people use social media? The leading social networks are usually available in multiple languages and enable users to connect with friends or people across geographical, political, or economic borders. In 2025, social networking sites are estimated to reach 5.42 billion users and these figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage and mobile social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.

In 2024, the largest number of VK app downloads was recorded in Russia, at over ** million. Thailand was the second-leading market of the social media app, with more than *** million downloads over the same period. VK is strongly present in Russian-speaking regions and neighboring countries. The app offers a social network, known in Russian as VKontakte, a messenger, music streaming, and other services of the VK company. VK in the Russian social media landscape VK has solidified its position as a major social network in Russia, used by over ** percent of the population aged 16 to 64 each month. Only the messengers WhatsApp and Telegram recorded a higher reach. VK's monthly active user base in the country reached nearly ** million in the fourth quarter of 2023, demonstrating consistent growth. Moreover, over ** million Russians used the platform via mobile devices daily. The platform's growth has been particularly notable since 2022 following the exit of several major Western social networks from the Russian market. VKontakte user demographics Women represent the largest share of VK users in Russia, at nearly ** percent as of October 2024. The social media platform attracts a diverse age range, with the biggest portion of users aged ** to **, followed closely by the 25-34 age group.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Goods from China were the most selling product category on Telegram in 2020, followed by digital equipment and consumer loans. In total, the e-commerce of goods from China via the social media platform exceeded ** million U.S. dollars.

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.

WhatsApp was the leading actively used messenger service in Germany in 2021. Almost 84 percent of users confirmed this. While WhatsApp is foremost a messaging service, certain features indicate similarities with social media networks, as sharing and posting between users still occurs, just not necessarily on a publicly accessible website. Delivering the message For most of the population, modern life is unimaginable without messenger apps. Texting has become much more varied as a form of communication thanks to extended file and content sharing options within messages. There is no doubt that WhatsApp is a popular messaging app in Germany. In 2023, almost 85 percent of people were messaging on WhatsApp every day. By 2025, it is estimated that over 53 million people will be using WhatsApp in Germany, suggesting it's popularity as a messaging app will not diminish with time. Personal data While Facebook is extremely popular in many different countries, long-term questions and concerns from users continue to arise, with personal data security being one of the leading topics of discussion. In general, the there have been many breaches of personal data online. At the same time, social media continues to enjoy rising popularity and use among the German population, both in a private and professional context.

When it comes to Poles communicating with their friends and family through mobile apps, the Facebook messaging app was the most frequently chosen mobile app. As of February 2022, 86 percent of Polish people used the Messenger application to communicate with others. WhatsApp ranked second, with 54 percent of respondents using the app. Polish instant messaging client Gadu-Gadu came second to last with approximately one in 10 respondents communicating through the app.

The profile of a Messenger user 

Mobile communication in Poland has been dominated by Facebook messenger. In January 2022, there were over 18 million Messenger users in Poland, which constituted an increase of roughly 1.5 million users compared to the year before. The majority of the app’s users were between 25 and 34 years old, with women dominating the age group share. Moreover, the same age group made up the highest share of the social media advertising audience Facebook, Instagram, and FB Messenger in Poland.

Mobile messaging 

 Mobile messaging is a type of instant online chat that offers real-time text transmission via the internet. In Poland, mobile devices are used by almost 63 percent of users to access the virtual world, with Samsung and Xiaomi holding the largest share of the smartphone market in the country. Therefore, Poles are open to communicating with others through mobile apps. Just over 32 percent of average internet users and almost 68 percent of Poles threatened with Internet addiction use the internet every day or nearly every day to contact friends via messengers such as Messenger (Facebook), WhatsApp, or GG (Gadu-Gadu). Moreover, almost half of Poles enjoy using emoticons as they find the virtual smileys an important way of expressing their emotions.

According to a survey conducted in South Korea in 2025 among mobile messenger users, ** percent of surveyed mobile messenger users stated that they use KakaoTalk. It was by far the most used messenger service in South Korea. KakaoTalk’s massive user base In South Korea, almost every person with access to the internet and a suitable device is using KakaoTalk. In 2025, domestic user numbers amounted to over ** million active users. Over the years, user numbers have only increased, with only one major fluctuation being recorded in 2018. The popularity of the messenger app has also stretched to other countries. Including its domestic users, KakaoTalk’s user base breached the 50-million mark back in 2018. What other Kakao Corp. services are commonly used?  Kakao Corporation, the internet-based company running KakaoTalk, offers numerous services. Many of these can be accessed via the messenger app itself and include services related to navigation, transportation, entertainment, and finances. In fact, the mobile banking service Kakao Bank attracted millions of users by the end of 2024 despite being only established as a digital bank in 2017.