Every buyer of Telegram ad slots has seen the pitch: a channel with 80,000 subscribers, views averaging 40,000 per post, engagement rate a healthy 50 percent. Sound too clean? It usually is. View counts are the most inflatable metric in the ecosystem, and the inflation is visible in the data - if you know what to look for.
The public preview at t.me/s/<channel> shows views per post without any login. That is the raw material. Four checks, five minutes:
1. The flattening test. Real audiences are noisy. Post-to-post view counts for authentic channels bounce around: weekday vs weekend, topic fatigue, competing content. Botted channels are eerily smooth - a coefficient of variation under ~5 percent across 30 posts is a red flag. Real humans do not show up on schedule.
2. The decay curve test. Views accumulate fast in the first hour, then decay. Bot farms deliver their quota in a burst and then the number goes flat - a post showing 25,000 views at hour two and 25,100 at day two is not an audience, it is an invoice. Watch the second delta between t.me/s/ snapshots taken hours apart; the shape tells you who is watching.
3. The ratio test. Divide a post's views by the channel's subscriber count and look at the distribution across your sample. Channels with 60-90 percent ratios across the board, on every topic, every hour, have bought the ratio. Organic channels have a long tail: announcements spike, filler posts sink, and the average lands in the 10-30 percent band.
4. The forward-ring test. Botted channels are rarely alone - farms sell packages. If three unrelated channels (different names, nominally different topics) show near-identical view curves on the same reposted posts, you have found one farm wearing three masks. The preview pages expose forwarded-from headers; that is where the ring reveals itself.
None of this needs the Telegram API, a bot token, or an account. It needs snapshots and arithmetic.
We run this as a standing job - snapshots every few hours, ratios and decay curves recomputed per channel, flags when the flattening test trips. The full collection-layer playbook (cursors, coverage ceilings, repost-ring flags, the flag thresholds we settled on after a false-positive wave) is in the Telegram & Web OSINT Bundle on Gumroad; the free pay-what-you-want sample brief walks through one flagged channel end to end: https://heyuhe.gumroad.com/l/ruldgm - the full bundle is https://heyuhe.gumroad.com/l/poddr.
Buying an ad slot on a channel is a market decision made with other people's attention as the raw material. Five minutes of public data is the cheapest due diligence in the game.
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