Telegram Metrics Glossary: ER, Reach, CPM and What Counts as Normal

Two analytics services will quote you different engagement rates for the same Telegram channel — 12% and 40% — and both will be right. They are measuring different things and calling them the same word.

Here is each metric with its formula and a normal range drawn from our base of 23,526 channels.

Subscribers

How many accounts are subscribed right now. Public, visible to anyone.

The property that matters: a subscriber stays in the counter after they stop reading. The number therefore describes the channel's past, not its current reach.

Median across our base: 3,145. Not a hundred thousand.

Views and median views

The counter under a post — how many times it was opened. Public.

To judge a channel you take a set of recent posts and compute the median, the middle of the range. The average is worse: one viral post lifts it and paints a week that will not repeat.

Median across our base: 652 views per post.

Reach

How many people saw the publication. In practice this is the median view count — no other data exists from outside. When a media kit claims "reach: 200,000", verify it against the counters in t.me/s/<name>; the media kit number is self-reported.

Engagement rate (ER)

ER = median views ÷ subscribers × 100%

The share of the audience that sees a given post. The most useful simple metric, and the one most often computed wrong.

Median across our base: 19.8%. Lower quartile 7.9%, upper 49.2%.

Two qualifications:

• ER depends on channel size. Under 1,000 subscribers the median is 53.8%;

above 500,000 it is 5.1%. One yardstick will not serve both — why.

• ER depends on posting frequency. Channels shipping 1–4 posts a month sit at

98.2%; those shipping more than 60 sit at 9.0%. The full picture.

ERR, ER post, ER day

Variants of the same idea, and the source of the confusion:

• ER post — one post: its views ÷ subscribers.
• ER day — all posts in a day: total views ÷ subscribers. For a channel posting

thirty times daily this produces a huge number, incomparable with ER post.

• ERR (reach rate) — another name for ER post.

When a service shows you "ER", find out which one. We report ER post from the median of recent posts.

CPM — cost per thousand impressions

CPM = post price ÷ (median views ÷ 1000)

The only honest way to compare two channels on price. "Price per post" says nothing: a post reaching 3,000 people and a post reaching 30,000 are different products.

Posting frequency

Posts published in a period, usually thirty days.

Median across our base: 39 posts a month. The spread is enormous: a quarter of channels ship under 12, a quarter over 133.

For an advertiser this is a risk metric. In a channel running a hundred posts a month, your ad leaves the screen within the hour.

Metric coherence

Not an industry term — ours. It measures whether a channel's numbers agree with each other: views against subscribers, views against frequency, reach against mentions.

Disagreement is the strongest external signal of inflation, because inflating one metric is easy and inflating all of them consistently is not.

What Telegram does not expose

No click-through rate. Telegram does not count clicks on links inside posts — only the link owner sees those.

No unsubscribe count. The counter shows the net result, not the movement. A channel can gain five hundred and lose five hundred daily and look perfectly stable.

No demographics from outside. Age, language and country live in the built-in statistics, which only the administrator can open.

No metrics for bots at all. A bot has no subscribers and no views: only uptime, response time and mentions can be measured.

Common questions

What is a good ER on Telegram? It depends on size and topic. Rough guide: 20–50% under 5,000 subscribers, 8–12% above 100,000. Below 2% means subscriptions without readers. Per-category ranges are in the metrics reference.

Is ERR different from ER? No — two names for the same quantity. The difference appears when a service computes per day instead of per post; those figures are not comparable.

Why does a channel show ER above 100%? Views do not come only from subscribers. Forwards and reposts carry a post outside the channel, and a viral post can collect several times more views than it has subscribers.

Subscribers or views — which matters? Views. Subscribers tell you how many people once signed up; views tell you how many will see your post today.