Vetting a Telegram Channel Before You Buy Ads: A Ten-Minute Checklist

A seller quotes a subscriber count and a price. Neither tells you what you are buying: subscribers are not readers, and a price per post means nothing without reach.

Seven checks below run on open data in about ten minutes. The order matters — the first three eliminate most candidates.

1. Median views, not subscribers

Open t.me/s/<channel>, read the counters under the last twenty posts, take the middle of the range.

That number is what you are paying for. The share of an audience that actually sees a post falls as the channel grows: 53.8% below a thousand subscribers, 5.1% above half a million. The breakdown by size.

2. Cost per thousand impressions

CPM = post price ÷ (median views ÷ 1000)

Compute it for every candidate and compare those. A channel that is "seven times bigger" often turns out more expensive per impression than a small one.

3. Date of the last post

Median views are computed from recent posts. If the channel went quiet a month ago, that number describes its history, not your placement.

In our base 1,696 channels have been silent for over thirty days while their subscriber counters sit there looking healthy — from outside they pass for working.

4. View spread

Look at the run of twenty posts. A live channel varies by multiples: some posts land, some do not. A suspiciously flat line with no peaks or troughs is the signature of automated view delivery.

5. Posting cadence

How many posts a day. In a channel running three an hour, your ad lives twenty minutes.

Median across our base is 39 posts a month, but politics and news run three times that. Read cadence together with topic — what counts as normal.

6. Mentions elsewhere

Subscribers are cheap to buy; a repost inside someone else's live channel is not. A channel with a hundred thousand subscribers that nobody ever links to is a mismatch.

7. Audience fit

The dullest check and the one most often skipped: read twenty recent posts and ask whether this is your reader. Perfect metrics against the wrong audience buy you impressions and nothing else.

Geography belongs here too. If the product is local, a city channel frequently beats a national one.

If the channel claims to be a brand

A public username on Telegram is released when its owner changes it and goes to whoever claims it next. Of 86 recognisable company names we checked, four had an unrelated object sitting behind the brand-shaped address. Take a company's official channel from a link on the company's own site, never from search.

What this checklist will not do

It does not guarantee a result. It removes the obviously bad options. Open data shows how a channel is built; it cannot tell you whether anyone will buy after your post. No metric predicts that.

It also does not prove inflation. Mismatched numbers occur in honest channels too — a badly targeted ad campaign produces exactly that profile. The accurate phrasing is "these numbers do not agree, look closer", not "this channel is fake".

Common questions

How much does advertising on a Telegram channel cost? The owner sets the price; there is no rate card. Compare candidates on CPM: post price divided by median views, times a thousand.

Subscribers or views — which should I look at? Views. Subscribers count people who once signed up; views count people who will see your post.

How can I tell subscribers have been bought? By disagreement between the numbers: low engagement, unnaturally flat view counts, no mentions anywhere despite a large audience.

Are small channels worth buying? Frequently, yes. They reach a larger share of their audience, their CPM is lower and their niche is tighter. The trade-off is absolute volume: you end up buying several placements instead of one.