“Those who left it return to the messenger”: head of TGStat analytics service about Telegram

- Posts on Telegram channels have become full-fledged sources of information, such as, for example, chats on WhatsApp and the group “Overheard”. How are messages in the “cart” fundamentally different from information from other sites?

- The authors of the channels on Telegram are free to speak, are not constrained by censorship and the risk of receiving “sanctions” from the platform. This inspires more confidence for some readers, and vice versa for some. Chats in WhatsApp and some other ways of disseminating information do not have any social confirmation (a large number of subscribers, citation), which, of course, affects both the credibility of the materials and their visibility to the media.

- What is the specificity of the contingent in Telegram connected with? It seems that the audience here is more mature, thinking and financially prosperous, while the messenger is very simple and understandable even for children.

- Due to the fact that the popularity of the messenger has increased, the structure of the audience has become much more diverse than at the start. Over the past two years, the audience has truly matured - 65% of users over 25 years old.

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Among working users, about 27% earn more than 90 thousand rubles (for comparison: according to Rosstat, 7.2% of the population earn more than 70 thousand rubles in Russia). Since a substantial part of the cited channels are copyright text blogs, your audience characterization is quite realistic.

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On the other hand, in Telegram, large-scale entertaining publics from other social networks come more and more actively with their existing audience, which is not always “thinking and prosperous”. This reduces the share of the "elite" audience, which the channel authors are so proud of, but increases the popularity of Telegram.

- How would you describe the average Telegram user?

- A couple of years ago, I would answer that this is an “IT specialist from Moscow,” but now it’s just “a man with a smartphone in his hands.”

- And the average author of the Telegram channel?

- A man with a smartphone that thousands of people hear live.

- Is it true that anonymous Telegram channels are more popular than copyright channels due to content that is not fixated on a specific person? Or has this trend changed?

- I think that authors who can hook on their content are more popular.

Anonymity adds zest, no more. Many public figures come to Telegram, leading a large audience.

The disclosure of the identity of the author of the Telegram channel "Stalingulag", which was conducted anonymously for several years, did not negatively affect the number of readers.

- What is the approximate share of advertising and custom materials in Telegram? Has this figure changed in the last year? If so, how and in which direction?

“We don't really follow this.” I think that there are enough orders at any platform, and Telegram, especially its political segment, is no exception.

- Is it true that native advertising, often even without direct links and recommendations, is gradually crowding out advertising posts? Does it make sense for Telegram channels to continue to rely on advertising, or is there an overabundance of it?

- There are a lot of advertisements in the channels, but, according to the results of the study, 50% of respondents still rarely meet with it or have not met at all.

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There is no overabundance of advertising; rather, there is an overabundance of channels created solely for the purpose of selling advertising, often of poor quality or well-worn. Cheaters should not particularly rely on a large number of advertisers, fraud is quickly revealed, the channel receives a cheat tag on TGStat and the sale of advertising ends here.

It is difficult to judge the distribution of shares between open and native advertising. Native integration is not applicable for every topic, so there is a feeling that it is much less than open advertising. But they say that good native advertising is the one that influenced us, remaining unidentified, so we can hardly calculate its volume in the near future.

- What is the reason for the outflow of subscribers from many popular Telegram channels, in addition to cleaning the bots? Glut? An abundance of advertising? Or is the local party just not for them?

- We did not notice any mass outflow, subscribers come and go at any sites. Popular Telegram channels show both natural outflow and natural organic growth. This is a normal situation.

After the blocking, some audience left the messenger, in its place a long time ago a new one came. Channels that were created after blocking did not encounter such a problem at all.

For cases when several thousand or tens of thousands of subscribers fall off at once in a short time, we closely monitor. They, as a rule, indicate that the author had wound up bots for himself, which were removed by Telegram itself due to a long absence of activity. We provide such channels with the appropriate label.

- A year ago, channels with insiders and instructions on bitcoin were very popular. And now there are similar trends?

- The number of cryptocurrency channels is no longer growing as fast as before, the share of channels on this topic is slowly falling. At the beginning of the year, new channels on the themes of “Darknet” and “Sports Betting” were actively appearing, but now more and more such channels receive the “scam” label from Telegram, which means fraudulent actions, and cease to exist.

Over the past month, the most active new channels have grown in the categories of "Blogs", "Business and Startups", "Humor and Entertainment", "Music", "News and Media".

- As the example of the “Former” showed, “anything” can “shoot” and find your reader. In your opinion, is there any universal secret to a successful channel? Do you need to constantly surprise the reader, or do people on Telegram come for familiar content for which they subscribed?

- The secret is simple, as on other media platforms: either you make some original idea and get growth through word of mouth (like Former or Equal Back), or you do the same thing that hundreds of others have done to you channels, but better and with a large advertising budget. In both cases, the basis should be quality content that is interesting to the audience.

- Roskomnadzor continues to ban Telegram. How much is user outflow associated with blocking? And is final resource blocking possible by ILV efforts?

- Users who decided to stay in the messenger after the initial blocking use it the same way, and new locks are unlikely to prevent this. According to our research, 95% of the users who stayed in Telegram do not notice the lock or bypass it safely.

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There is no evidence in favor of the fact that over the past year the audience of the messenger has decreased (due to the actions of the ILV, due to the additional efforts of the ILV or for any other reasons). On the contrary, all research companies unanimously talk about audience growth. According to TGStat, about 400 thousand new subscriptions in total are made daily to Russian-language channels. Telegram's audience is growing, new channels are being created, the messenger is developing, and those who left it, including well-known media and their representatives, are returning to it.