The Telegram channel census: 3 million public channels by size, language and topic

Telegram reports how many people use it each month, but not how many public channels it hosts or what is in them. Between April 14 and August 13, 2026 our index recorded 3,034,395 public channels and 60,817 public groups. This article counts the channels by size, language, topic, advertising and activity.

Most channels are small

We recorded a subscriber count for 2,293,485 channels. Half have fewer than 771 subscribers and a quarter have fewer than 242. Only 6.4% reach 10,000, and 0.55% reach 100,000.

Subscriptions are spread the other way round. Channels under 1,000 subscribers make up 56.8% of all channels but hold only 4.4% of subscriptions. The 10,000 to 100,000 band is just 5.8% of channels, yet it holds 34.2% of subscriptions, more than any other band.

Subscriber counts are the numbers Telegram displays. They include inactive and automated accounts, and a person subscribed to ten channels is counted ten times. Totals in this article are subscriptions, not people.

One percent of channels hold 44% of the audience

The 229 largest channels, the top 0.01%, hold 8.1% of all subscriptions between them. The top 0.1% hold 20.8%, the top 1% hold 44.4% and the top 10% hold 77.2%. The Gini coefficient of subscriber counts is 0.84, on a scale where 0 means every channel is the same size and 1 means one channel has every subscriber.

Small channels look Russian, the largest look English

We take a channel's language from its own description. How often that works depends on size: we can identify the language of 11% of channels under 100 subscribers and 97% of channels above a million. The mix shifts as sharply. Among identified channels under 100 subscribers, 85% are Russian. Above a million subscribers, English leads with 45%, ahead of Russian at 29% and Persian at 15%.

Part of this gap may reflect how our index was built rather than Telegram itself, and below 10,000 subscribers we cannot tell the two apart. Above that line we know the language of more than 90% of channels, so the language shares in this article are for channels of that size.

Above 10,000 subscribers, English matches Russian on audience

The index has 146,484 channels with 10,000 or more subscribers. They hold 71.0% of all subscriptions, and we identified the language of 133,186 of them.

Russian has the most channels, 33.7%. English channels are fewer but larger, so the two end up almost level on subscriptions: 31.2% for English and 30.5% for Russian. Persian is third by both measures, with 11.4% of channels and 12.1% of subscriptions, even though Iran has blocked Telegram since 2018. Arabic is fourth with 9.0% of channels.

Burmese, spoken in Myanmar, has 1,650 channels above 10,000 subscribers, about as many as French (1,644) and twice as many as German (768). Amharic, the working language of Ethiopia, has 858, also more than German.

What channels are about

Our analyser read recent posts from 300,375 channels and gave each a set of free-form topic tags, usually five. These are the larger channels: their median size is 6,271 subscribers, and together they hold 69.3% of all subscriptions in the index. We grouped the tags into 27 topic families. A channel counts toward every family that any of its tags falls into, so the shares below add up to more than 100%.

The three most common families are news and current affairs (15.8%), humour and entertainment (15.6%) and education and science (15.2%). Counting subscriptions instead of channels changes the picture. Crypto and trading channels are 6.3% of the total but hold 17.8% of subscriptions, close to news at 18.4%. Religious channels are the opposite case: 8.8% of channels, 4.2% of subscriptions.

Every language runs a different Telegram

Each language has its own mix of topics. A religion tag appears on 36% of Arabic-language channels and 38% of Amharic ones. In Chinese the largest single topic is adult content (32%); in Ukrainian it is news, with the war close behind (23%). German-language channels are the most political in the index: 38% carry a politics tag.

Betting is most common among Turkish channels (26%) and film and TV among Burmese ones (37%). English has the highest share of crypto channels, 19%. Nearly half of all channels that hand out VPNs and proxies (47%) are in Persian.

The largest channels are games, proxies and Telegram itself

The index has 569 channels with more than a million subscribers: 249 in English, 161 in Russian and 83 in Persian. At least 220 of them carry a crypto tag.

There are almost no media at the very top. Crypto projects and tap-to-earn games, most of them from the 2024 boom, hold 16 of the 25 largest channels. Hamster Kombat is first with 24.3 million subscribers, although it had not posted for 513 days when we checked; our study of silent channels looks at what happened to that audience. Two more channels publish proxy servers for reaching Telegram where it is blocked: Proxy MTProto with 11.8 million subscribers and the Persian-language iRo Proxy with 7.3 million. Telegram's own channels take four more places.

Where channels are aimed

Where it can tell, the analyser also records which country or region a channel is written for. The largest group, 43.9% of analysed channels, addresses an international audience. Russia is the most common single country at 22.9%, followed by Iran (9.7%), Uzbekistan (3.7%) and Ukraine (2.6%). Myanmar, Iraq and Ethiopia each have more channels written for them than Germany or the United States.

One channel in four carries advertising

The analyser also notes whether a channel's recent posts include paid placements. It found advertising in 23.1% of analysed channels, and a lot of it in 13.2%. Bigger channels sell more: 18.2% of channels with 1,000 to 10,000 subscribers carry ads, against 39.4% of those with 100,000 to a million. Above a million the share drops back to 35.0%.

Betting and gambling channels carry the most advertising: 78.4% of them have it. Religious channels carry the least (3.6%), followed by war and politics channels.

About half of all channels are still posting

For 254,854 channels we know both when they last posted and when we looked. Within that group, 47.7% had posted in the previous 30 days and 19.6% had said nothing for over a year. Burmese channels were the most active (70.5% posted within 30 days), followed by Ukrainian and Turkish. English channels were among the least active, with 26.9% silent for over a year. Our graveyard study covers silent channels in detail.

Half of all channels post video

Nearly all analysed channels post text (97.3%) and most also post photos. Half post video. Fewer than one channel in ten forwards posts from other channels, and about as few run polls.

Profile a language or a topic

Choose a language to see its channel count, activity, advertising, topics and target countries. Switch to a topic family to see which languages it is spread across and which tags it is built from. The figures come from the same aggregate file as the rest of the article.