Methodology
How we measure Telegram channels
Every number on our rankings and channel pages comes from the public Telegram surface — observed, snapshotted and dated, never bought or guessed. Here is exactly what each metric is, how it is computed, and what it is not.
We currently track 13.4M Telegram channels and snapshot the largest ones daily.
Where the numbers come from
We observe what Telegram itself publishes about a public channel — subscriber count, recent post views, language and category — and store a dated snapshot. Top channels refresh nightly; the long tail rotates more slowly. We have no admin access to any channel and no privileged analytics: everything here can be reproduced from the public surface. Numbers are observation-as-of timestamps, not a live counter.
What each metric means
The four metrics behind every ranking — and the honest caveat on each.
- Members count
- Direct from Telegram's public channel-info endpoint. We refresh top-1000 channels nightly and the long tail weekly. Numbers shown are observation-as-of timestamps, not real-time — Telegram itself doesn't publish a live counter.
- Average views
- Median of the last 20 posts. Median is more honest than mean — single viral posts skew mean. Channels with fewer than 20 posts use whatever they have.
- Language tag
- Detected from the title + last 10 posts via langdetect. ~92% accuracy on top-1000 channels by manual spot-check. Channels with multi-language audiences (e.g. RU/EN mixing) keep the dominant tag.
- Category
- Our own label, not Telegram’s — Telegram publishes no channel category. A rules-based classifier reads the channel title and description and picks one topic from a fixed vocabulary; it does not read posts and there is no manual override. Channels it cannot place stay untagged. See /info/channel-category.
What makes this different
The ads running inside a channel
Uniquely, we pair channel analytics with the advertisers and creatives observed inside a channel, sourced from our open ad archive. No other Telegram-stats tool shows who advertises where.
Engagement & growth, open and indexable
Engagement-rate and 30-day growth leaderboards — by metric and by language — are free and crawlable, not locked behind a paid tier or hidden from search.
Open data, public API, CC-BY
Every ranking is available as JSON at /api/v1/channels under a CC-BY-4.0 licence. Quote it, build on it, audit it.
Honest audience-quality signals
Where others print a made-up “% bots”, we show a traffic-light estimate with the reasons behind it — and label it an estimate, because we have no admin-level audience data.
Limits & what is not here yet
- Engagement rate is approximate
- We report average views per subscriber, not Telegram-native per-post ER, which only a channel admin can see. Use it for relative comparison.
- Growth covers tracked channels
- Growth needs at least two daily snapshots, so today it covers the channels we snapshot (the larger ones) and widens as coverage grows.
- No subscriber demographics
- Audience geography, age and gender are admin-only on Telegram and not exposed publicly. We do not estimate them — better no number than a fake one.
- Citation graph — on the roadmap
- Who forwards or cites a channel is planned, pending an accurate public data source. We will ship it when we can do it right, not before.
Methodology FAQ
- How often are channels rescanned?
- Top-1000 channels by members: nightly. Channels with active sponsored-message activity in the last 7 days: every 6 hours. Long tail (10k-1M members): weekly. Tiny channels (<10k members): on-demand only.
- Why is my channel's member count off by a few hundred?
- Telegram's public counter rounds aggressively for channels with 10k+ members. We record the rounded number. For exact counts, channel owners can use the official Telegram Analytics in the app.
- How do you estimate CPM?
- CPM estimates come from observed ad pricing on similar-size channels in similar language/category brackets. See /info/cpm for the formula. Not authoritative — use for relative comparison, not procurement.
- Is there a public API for channel stats?
- Yes — /api/v1/channels returns the same data as the rankings on this page, in JSON. Sortable by members / avg_views / language. Free tier 60 req/min.
- How do I claim my channel?
- Currently no claim mechanism — all data is observed from public Telegram surface. If your channel is mis-classified (wrong category or language), report via /dmca with the username and we'll re-run the classifier.
- Do you have historical channel data?
- Yes — `ChannelSnapshot` table preserves daily snapshots for top-1000 channels since the start of our pipeline (2024). Available via /api/v1/channels/<username>/history (Pro tier).
- What's the licence on this data?
- CC-BY-4.0 — see creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. Quote in articles, build derivative tools, train models. Attribution to telegramstats.net or tgadsspy.com required.
See it in the data