Telegram statistics 2026: 1B+ monthly users, 15M Premium subscribers, $870M half-year revenue

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 7 October 2026

Telegram passed 1 billion monthly active users on March 19, 2025, according to Pavel Durov's post on his own channel, and the founder added that the average user opens the app 21 times a day and spends 41 minutes in it. Paid Premium subscriptions crossed 15 million two months later. Revenue for the first half of 2025 reached $870 million, up 65%, in unaudited accounts reported by the Financial Times.

Almost every headline number about Telegram comes straight from the horse's mouth. Telegram has no listed shares, so user milestones arrive as posts at t.me/durov, which carried 10.5 million subscribers on October 7, 2026. Everything else comes from houses measuring narrower things: app downloads (Sensor Tower), web visits & Android installs (Similarweb), a national audience panel (Mediascope in Russia) and channel catalogs (TGStat, Telega.io).

This report sorts those numbers by publisher. It covers users, revenue, Premium, countries, Russia's 2026 slowdown and demographics, plus a long section on channels covering counts, the largest feeds, reach and analytics tools. Every figure was checked on October 7, 2026.

It's written for marketers buying Telegram ads, analysts sizing Telegram against social media statistics for other networks, and researchers who follow channels as a source. The numbers matter to ad buyers and channel owners alike, since Telegram has paid owners of public channels with 1,000+ subscribers half of the ad revenue from their channels since March 2024.

How many people use Telegram: over 1 billion a month, 41 minutes a day

Telegram's user count is a series of founder announcements posted at t.me/durov:

• 700 million monthly users on June 21, 2022 (t.me/durov/189).
• 800 million monthly users "earlier this year," per a July 2023 post that also claimed 2.5 million sign-ups a day (t.me/durov/215).
• 900 million in spring 2024 and 950 million on July 22, 2024 (t.me/durov/337).
• Over 1 billion on March 19, 2025, which Durov said made Telegram the second most popular messaging app outside China (t.me/durov/404).

The devil's in the details. Durov's posts state totals, and the definition of a monthly active user stays inside the company. The engagement averages from the March 2025 post, 21 opens and 41 minutes per user per day, are Telegram's own calculation too.

Kepios, the house behind DataReportal, did the arithmetic on the last two milestones. Its April 2025 Global Statshot worked out that Telegram added an average of 209,000 active users per day between July 2024 and March 2025. Kepios counted 5.66 billion social media user identities in its Digital 2026 report, so 1 billion Telegram users equal 17.7% of that total (our calculation).

Downloads tell a longer story. Sensor Tower put Telegram past 1 billion lifetime installs in August 2021, with 214.7 million in the first half of that year, as TechCrunch reported. Durov wrote on Telegram's 13th birthday, August 14, 2026, that it had been one of the 10 most downloaded mobile apps in the world for the past 7.5 years (t.me/durov/541).

Telegram revenue, profit and Premium subscribers

Telegram turned its first annual profit in 2024. Durov's December 23, 2024 post said revenue passed $1 billion and the company closed the year with over $500 million in cash, plus its crypto assets. His March 2025 post put 2024 profit at $547 million.

The 2025 numbers came out through bond investors. Telegram's unaudited first-half accounts, reported by the Financial Times, show:

• $870 million in revenue for January to June 2025, up 65% from $525 million a year earlier.
• About $300 million of it from exclusivity deals tied to the TON blockchain & Toncoin.
• Premium at $223 million and ads at $125 million, per Yahoo Finance's account of the same figures.
• A net loss of more than $220 million, against a $334 million profit in the first half of 2024, after Toncoin's price fell.
• More than $450 million of Toncoin sold in the year to date, and $500 million of Telegram bonds frozen in Russia under Western sanctions.
• A full-year 2025 revenue target of $2 billion, after a $1.7 billion convertible bond sale in May 2025.

The jury's still out on that $2 billion target, since full-year 2025 accounts hadn't been reported by October 7, 2026.

Premium is the line Durov tracks in public. It launched in June 2022 and raised the file sharing limit from 2 GB to 4 GB per file, with a 1,000-channel follow limit, per the launch post. Paid subscribers passed 1 million on December 6, 2022, 4 million on December 8, 2023, 5 million on January 9, 2024 and 10 million on September 6, 2024. They tripled across 2024 to beat 12 million and reached 15 million on May 27, 2025.

Fifteen million payers are a drop in the bucket against a billion users. Premium still out-earned ads in the first half of 2025, $223 million to $125 million.

Telegram users by country: India, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil

The country split comes from three kinds of source. Durov gave the clearest single number on June 16, 2026, when India's IT ministry banned Telegram for a week over leaked exam questions. The ban, he wrote, punished "150 million ordinary Telegram users in India" (t.me/durov/529).

Install data points the same way. India took the lion's share of Telegram's first billion downloads, about 22%, with Russia at 10% and Indonesia at 8%, per Sensor Tower's August 2021 count. TGStat's catalogs, sorted by channel's geo and language, add a channel-side view, with Russia at 1,698,000 channels, Uzbekistan at 205,000 and Iran at 126,000. Our Sensor Tower pricing report covers what that data costs.

Similarweb's telegram.org traffic page for September 2026 lists Russia (16.26%), Ukraine (8.86%), India (7.72%), Brazil (4.75%) and the US (4.6%) as the top five sources of visits. A separate Similarweb study of Android data in 100 countries placed Telegram's strength in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, as the top messaging app in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, Uzbekistan, China and Cambodia, with an install penetration of 43.36%.

Pew Research Center's December 2022 key facts found 27% of American adults had heard of Telegram and 2% regularly got news there.

Telegram in Russia: Mediascope reach before and after the 2026 slowdown

Russia has an independent panel that measures Telegram month by month. Roskomnadzor began slowing Telegram nationwide on February 10, 2026, Meduza reported, after restricting Telegram and WhatsApp calls from August 2025. Telegram has been skating on thin ice there ever since.

Mediascope's figures for desktop and mobile users aged 12 and over, published by Sostav on April 9, 2026:

• Average daily reach fell from 80 million in February 2026 to 72.2 million in March, 7.8 million fewer people a day.
• Time per user fell from 44 minutes a day to 34, a 23% drop.
• Monthly audience slipped 1.5%, from 95.7 million to 94.3 million.

Survey data agrees on direction. A Levada Center poll run March 18 to 26, 2026, when the app worked for most Russians only through a VPN, found 49% still read channels on Telegram, down from 53% a year earlier, Meduza reported. The daily-reader share fell from 25% to 20%.

Durov argues the blocks leak. He wrote in June 2026 that 95% of Russian teenagers kept using Telegram through the earlier ban by switching to VPNs (t.me/durov/528).

Telegram user demographics: age and gender

The nearest measured age and gender split comes from Similarweb's panel of telegram.org web visitors for September 2026:

• Gender: 60.87% male, 39.13% female.
• Age: 18 to 24 at 22.44%, 25 to 34 at 29.69%, 35 to 44 at 19.77%, 45 to 54 at 12.41%, 55 to 64 at 10.07%, 65 and over at 5.62%.

So 25 to 34 is the largest bracket, and 52.13% of measured visitors are under 35 (our sum). Treat it as a web-audience sample, since most installs sit on phones in India and Indonesia. Our Similarweb pricing report covers what the panel costs.

Telegram channel statistics: how many channels exist and how big they get

A channel is a one-to-many broadcast with no cap on subscribers, per the channels FAQ. Groups top out at 200,000 members, per the main FAQ. That hybrid of messenger and broadcaster puts channels at the center of Telegram stats, and Telegram said in March 2024 that users generate over 1 trillion views in channels every month.

TGStat is the nearest thing to a channel census. It files each entry by the channel's geo and language, and its front page listed these country totals on October 7, 2026:

The ten catalogs add up to about 2.31 million channels and 231,300 groups (our sum). TGStat also prints a total audience per catalog, 5.68 billion for Russia, and that figure adds up subscriptions. Read between the lines there, because one person with 50 subscriptions counts 50 times.

Telega.io's ad catalog is narrower at 112,916 entries, since it lists what an advertiser can book. Its ranking by subscribers, checked October 7, 2026, puts crypto community accounts and Telegram's own feeds at the top:

Telegram's own counters agree within rounding. The @telegram page showed 9.38 million subscribers on October 7, 2026, and Hamster Kombat's announcement feed showed 20.5 million. TGStat's global ranking puts Blum first at 13,830,671 subscribers and Pavel Durov third at 10,490,104, and PAWS and X Empire sit outside its top ten.

Subscriber counts and reach split apart on the crypto feeds. Blum reaches 42.9K of 13.8 million subscribers per post, a 0.3% rate, while Telegram Tips reaches 1.5 million of 10.8 million.

Hamster Kombat shows how fast a game can build an audience. The game signed up 239 million people in three months and hit 100 million monthly users in 73 days, Durov wrote on July 4, 2024. Its community feed's latest post, from January 20, 2026, drew 3.94 million views.

Channel's geo and language: how Telegram channel stats are measured

Three layers produce channel stats, and each sees a different slice. Telegram's built-in Statistics page comes first. The channels tour says advanced statistics are available for channels with more than 500 subscribers, and the API documentation adds that the exact limit is a server-side setting. Only admins can access this page, and it returns:

• Followers, views per post, shares per post and reactions per post for the period.
• Growth, follower, mute and top-hours graphs.
• Views by source and new followers by source, such as search or links.
• A languages graph, the first-party version of the channel's geo and language data TGStat shows.

Admins of smaller channels can't access this page until they pass the threshold. Admins who keep an eye on churn get the mute graph next to joins and leaves. The view counter runs generous, too. Per the channels FAQ, forwarded copies add to a post's total, and Telegram forgets a viewer after about four days and counts them again on a return visit.

TGStat is the second layer. Every TGStat profile opens with a "Channel's geo and language" field, World and English for @telegram. The subscriber chart, citation index, posts reach, engagement and advertising tabs sit behind a gate that reads "Sign in to access this page".

Anyone who wants a channel's subscriber history has to sign in to access it. TGStat's ratings rank channels by subscribers, growth, reach and citation, with separate lists for public and private feeds.

Commercial tools make up the third layer:

• Telega.io tracks subscribers, average reach and ERR, its engagement rate by reach, across 112,916 entries.
• Popsters compares several feeds at once on views and engagement by content type and text length, with a 7-day free trial.
• LiveDune covers channels, groups and chats with follower dynamics, ER, ERV and post reach, from $33 a month for 5 accounts up to $225 for 100.
• Brand24 monitors mentions and sentiment in public channels, per its May 2026 guide. Our Brand24 review covers the plans, and the social listening ranking compares it with rivals.

Popsters and LiveDune both ask new users to sign in to access the 7-day trial. All four tools build their Telegram channels statistics from public feeds, filtered by channel's geo and language, and detailed analytics on a private channel come from the admin's own Statistics page.

Bots, mini apps and channel monetization

Telegram runs a bot platform alongside chats and channels, and Hamster Kombat's 239 million sign-ups in 2024 showed a mini app could hit the jackpot inside it. In June 2026 Telegram added tables, nested lists, formulas and inline media to chatbot messages, Durov posted on June 13. The chatbot statistics report sizes the wider bot market.

Channels earn money through Telegram's ad platform. Since March 31, 2024, owners of public channels with at least 1,000 subscribers receive 50% of the revenue from ads shown in them, paid in Toncoin, per the monetization announcement.

Why the published Telegram figures diverge

Every Telegram number answers a different question. The main measures as of October 7, 2026:

The sign-up figure and the growth figure differ by a factor of 12. Durov's 2.5 million a day, from 2023, counts registrations, while Kepios's 209,000 is the net change in monthly users after dormant accounts drop out. Downloads overstate users the same way, because one person can reinstall on every new phone.

Similarweb's 366.9 million visits measure the website and web client, a small corner of an app-first service. Mediascope's 94.3 million is a panel measurement for one country, ages 12 and up. Durov's India figure of 150 million is the company's own, published in a post protesting a government ban.

The channel counts diverge on scope. TGStat counts across ten country catalogs, each assigning a channel's geo and language by its own filing, and Telega.io lists the 112,916 entries an advertiser can book. Finding one feed among 2.3 million is a needle in a haystack without them. Reddit statistics, by contrast, rest on user counts Reddit files with the SEC each quarter.

Frequently asked questions

Who mainly uses Telegram?

Users in India, Russia, Indonesia, Ukraine and Brazil. By channel's geo and language, TGStat's Russia catalog is the largest at 1,698,000 channels. Durov put India at 150 million users in June 2026, Mediascope counts 94.3 million monthly users in Russia, and Sensor Tower attributes 22% of lifetime installs to India and 8% to Indonesia. Similarweb's web panel skews male at 60.87%, with 25 to 34 year olds the largest group at 29.69%.

Do police monitor Telegram?

Police can read public channels like anyone else. Under section 8.3 of Telegram's privacy policy, a valid order from judicial authorities naming a user as a suspect in a criminal case can lead Telegram to disclose that user's IP address and phone number, and such disclosures go into quarterly transparency reports. The OSINT community's monitoring tools appear in the open source intelligence tools ranking.

Is 18+ content allowed on Telegram?

Telegram's terms of service bar users from posting "illegal pornographic content on publicly viewable Telegram channels, bots, etc." TGStat's ratings still carry Erotic and Adult categories.

How to find secret Telegram channels?

Public channels have a username and show up in Telegram search. Private channels stay under the radar of search and need an invite link or an owner's add, per the channels FAQ. TGStat keeps a separate rating of private channels, and its statistics tabs make you sign in to access them. The gate on each tab reads "Sign in to access this page".

Do Telegram groups earn money?

Telegram's ad revenue share pays channel owners. Public channels with 1,000 or more subscribers get 50% of ad revenue, paid in Toncoin, under rules Telegram set on March 31, 2024, so a group owner who wants that share runs a channel next to the group.

Can we track a Telegram user?

Other users see a location only when someone turns on People Nearby visibility or shares a Live Location, per section 3.5 of the privacy policy. Law enforcement can obtain an IP address and phone number through a valid court order.

Is Telegram a red flag?

Telegram is a mainstream app with over 1 billion monthly users and 15 million paying subscribers. The concern centers on what open channels carry. Pew's 2022 review of 200 prominent accounts found 57% posted about guns and gun rights, and Telegram's safety page counted over 27.1 million groups and channels blocked in 2026 to October 7, including over 437,000 for child sexual abuse material and over 182,000 for terrorist content.

Bottom line

In a nutshell, Telegram's headline figures, 1 billion monthly users, 41 minutes a day and 15 million Premium subscribers, come from one source, its founder's channel. Mediascope's Russian panel is the closest thing to an audit, and it showed how fast daily use fell under a government slowdown while the monthly audience barely moved.

For channel stats, use the built-in Statistics page for a channel you run, since only its admins can access this page, and TGStat or Telega.io for anyone else's, filtered by channel's geo and language. Weigh reach over subscribers, since Blum's 13.8 million subscribers yield a 42.9K average reach per post.

Readers sizing Telegram against Facebook statistics, Instagram statistics, TikTok statistics or YouTube statistics are comparing a founder's announcements with numbers that companies report to regulators or advertisers.