What 583,000 Active Telegram Channels Tell Us About Telegram in 2026

John Rico — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 07:43:55 +0000

An open dataset of the 10,000 largest channels, plus country and language totals.

Telegram doesn't publish channel statistics, so most "Telegram market" numbers you see online are guesses. We index public Telegram channels for TGMarket, and here is what the data looks like as of October 2026. Everything below is reproducible from the open dataset linked at the end.

Scope: public channels and groups with a username, 1,000+ subscribers and at least one post in the last 90 days. Scam/fake-flagged, adult, darknet, shock and gambling channels are excluded.

1. The size: 583k active channels, median 3,400 subscribers

583,378 active public channels and groups (53k of them groups).
8.4 billion subscriptions in total (one person follows many channels, so this is not a user count).
The median channel has 3,367 subscribers.
12,493 channels have 100k+ subscribers; 512 have over a million.

Telegram is a long-tail platform: about two thirds of active channels have 1k–10k subscribers.

2. Bigger channels get a smaller share of views

Average views per post as a share of subscribers (channels only):

Channel size	Channels	Median views / subscribers	Median ER (reactions / views)
1k–10k	401,303	21.6%	1.44%
10k–100k	112,133	11.4%	0.82%
100k–1M	11,256	6.5%	0.70%
1M+	497	2.9%	0.84%

A 5,000-subscriber channel reaches about one in five subscribers with each post. A million-subscriber channel reaches about one in thirty-five. For advertisers, this means CPM and views matter more than subscriber count. Large channels collect years of inactive subscribers, and some buy them. We track this decay and fake-audience signals per channel.

3. Languages: Russian leads, but English, Persian and Arabic together are bigger

Language	Active channels
Russian	193,621
English	87,472
Persian	83,762
Arabic	76,288
Uzbek	16,727
Ukrainian	15,694
Spanish	10,746
Hindi	10,743
Chinese	8,308
Burmese	7,771

Persian is the surprise for many: Iran has almost as many active channels as the whole English-speaking world, despite Telegram being blocked there since 2018.

4. Countries: where channels with a known location are

Country is estimated for about one in five channels (from text and network signals). Among those:

Country	Active channels	Median subscribers
Russia	70,740	3,364
Iran	19,768	3,837
India	18,029	4,208
Ukraine	11,188	4,370
Uzbekistan	8,003	3,710
United States	3,768	4,124
Iraq	3,313	4,013
Ethiopia	2,540	3,928
Germany	2,010	3,241

Full country breakdown with top topics: Telegram channels by country.

5. Topics: education beats news

Topic	Active channels
Education	57,086
News	32,011
Finance	27,463
Entertainment	25,996
Islam	24,887
Music	18,605
Exam prep	16,185
Technology	14,526

Education and exam prep together make up 73k channels, more than twice as many as news. Much of this is India, Iran, Uzbekistan and Ethiopia, where Telegram works as a free course platform.

6. The 2022 peak

Active channels by creation year:

Year	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
Channels	23k	32k	57k	69k	114k	95k	81k	49k

2022 is the record year, most likely because the war in Ukraine and the departure of Western platforms from Russia moved media and creators to Telegram. Newer years look smaller partly because young channels haven't reached 1,000 subscribers yet.

Get the data

Dataset: Top 10,000 Telegram Channels, October 2026, CC BY 4.0. Includes username, subscribers, average views, ER, language, country, topic, posting activity, plus country and language totals. Kaggle · Hugging Face
Search the full catalog by country, language, topic, growth or ad price: tgmarket.io

Methodology: snapshot of TGMarket's index on 2026-10-24. Views are averaged over recent posts old enough to have collected most of their views. ER is average reactions divided by average views. Country, language and topic are automatic estimates.

DEV Community: John Rico