How we count
Every number in the catalog comes from public feeds crawled by our crawler. Here are the formulas, periods and thresholds: what is behind each number and when we do not show it. A number can be trusted only when you can see how it was obtained.
Where the data comes from
The crawler walks open Telegram groups and channels through the official API — only venues anyone can open without an invitation. The catalog includes venues with posts in the index and large ones (1,000+ subscribers) even without posts.
Excluded: venues hidden on request, venues marked by Telegram as scam, and service venues. The catalog and statistics are numbers about venues: they do not show individual people.
Subscribers and growth
Subscribers — the number of channel subscribers or group members from the latest crawl.
Growth — the difference with a daily measurement: over a day, a week and a month. Measurements are collected since 29.09.2026, so weekly growth exists since 06.10.2026 and monthly since 29.10.2026. While history is shorter than a week, the “Fastest growing” ranking uses daily growth.
Audience check
The check compares a venue with others of the same size — five channel sizes, three group sizes — and shows a score out of 100 and every sign with its figure and what is usual for similar venues. Norms come from the catalog: 52,600 channels and 59,193 groups.
Channels (1,000+ subscribers and 10+ posts with views in 30 days): post reach; forwards per 1,000 views (not counted when the channel forbids forwarding); the spread of post views — flat views are typical of bought ones; reach of fresh posts against posts a month old; subscriber jumps between fresh measurements and unsubscribe waves. A jump with ads in our index is explained growth, and a count that stood still and then caught up at once is not growth at all. Being quoted and forwarded counts in favour.
Groups (1,000+ members and 20+ writers in 30 days): the share of members who write; the same text from many — messages written word for word by three or more different people (30 %+ of messages is a strong sign); round-the-clock writing — the quietest hour holds 85 %+ of the usual (people are noticeably quieter at night); joining or leaving in a wave. Replying to each other counts in favour.
Score: 100 − 25 per strong sign (worse than 95 % of similar venues) − 10 per weak one (worse than 85 %) + up to 10 for a live audience. 90+ is high trust, 70–89 usual, below 70 below usual. We say a venue looks inflated only when two strong signs meet: one odd sign happens to honest venues too. Fewer than three measurable signs means not enough data, with no score.
Who writes in the chat
Counted from the group's indexed messages over 30 days. “Wrote” is how many different people posted at least one message; “newcomers” posted their first message in this group (in our index) within those 30 days, “regulars” had posted before. If our index has seen the group for less than 60 days, newcomers can't be told from regulars, so we show the date our history starts instead.
“Half of all messages come from N people” — the most active authors who wrote half of the month's messages: the smaller N, the more the chat rests on a few people. “The 10 most active” — their share of messages. Anonymous admins and the group itself are not counted. Numbers only — no names.
Ads
The ads index looks for links to other venues in channel posts. “Labelled ad” — the post carries an ad label: erid, #реклама, “Реклама. ООО/ИП…”, #ad; manual checks confirm almost all of these. “By signs” — no label, but the post calls to join another venue, the channel has 10,000+ subscribers, the same venue appeared in at least two different channels within a week, and the channel itself mentioned it no more than three times a month.
Not counted as ads: own channels and networks, admin and support contacts, source credits, bots and people, unlabelled lists of many venues. Visible links in the text are counted for a year, hidden links and “Subscribe” buttons since 2026-10-03 as channels are crawled; the crawl does not see every post, so the list is incomplete.
Posts and activity
Posts in 30 days — unique posts of the venue in the index over the last 30 days; for a group these are members' messages.
Writers — how many different people wrote in the group in 30 days. For a group this is the main sign of life: message volume is easy to inflate with flooding, the number of writers is not.
Channel posts
Posts a channel publishes as itself are not part of the search index: the index consists of group messages and author-signed posts. So for most channels we show subscribers, growth and citations, and posts, reach and ER only when the channel's posts are in the index.
If a channel has no posts in the index, it does not mean the channel is silent — and we never say so.
Reach
Average reach — the average number of views of a channel post in 30 days. Only posts for which Telegram shows views are counted. Shown for channels with 50+ subscribers.
ER — engagement
ER = average post reach ÷ subscribers × 100%. Computed for channels with 100+ subscribers and at least three posts in 30 days.
If reach is five or more times the audience, we do not show ER and say so on the venue page: such a ratio almost always means inflated views, not engagement.
The “Best engagement” ranking includes channels with 5,000+ subscribers, at least five posts in 30 days and ER up to 100%; the “Biggest reach” ranking — channels with 1,000+ subscribers, at least three posts and reach no more than twice the audience.
Citations
Citations — how many other venues forwarded this venue's posts: in 30 days and all time. Self-forwards are not counted.
The statistics page shows who cites the venue and whom it cites — catalog venues only; forwards from people are not shown.
Conversation in a group
Reply to others — share of writers who replied to someone else's message at least once in 30 days. Messages answered — share of messages that got a reply. Replies per thread — how many replies an answered message gets on average.
Together they tell a live discussion from a notice board where people post but do not talk. Computed for groups where at least three people wrote in 30 days.
Score and catalog rank
Rank in the catalog, in a topic and in a language — by the combined score:
score = lg(1 + subscribers) + activity + lg(1 + venues citing in 30 days)
+ 0.6 · lg(1 + average reach) + 0.3 for Telegram's check mark
− 0.6 for a group with no messages in 30 days
channel activity = 0.6 · lg(1 + posts in 30 days)
group activity = 0.7 · lg(1 + writers in 30 days)The logarithm evens out scale: a channel with a million subscribers is not a thousand times “better” than one with a thousand. Group activity counts writing people, not message volume — otherwise flood chats would rise to the top.
Category and language
Category — one of the catalog's 52 categories; subcategory — one of the 506 subcategories within them. A model assigns them from the venue's recent posts and its card; a large venue with no posts in the index is labeled from its card alone, and only with confidence of 0.9 or higher. A venue that writes on two subjects is also listed in its second subcategory.
The venue's language — by the language of its posts.
Freshness
The catalog is rebuilt four times a day — at 02:50, 09:15, 15:15 and 21:15 UTC; the night build also recomputes totals over each venue's whole history. A venue statistics page is kept up to 12 hours.
Catalog pages state the time of the data. If crawling pauses, the catalog shows the latest computed numbers with their date rather than empty pages.
Zero and “no data”
Zero is a result: we looked and found nothing. “No data” means there is nothing to count: the venue was not crawled over the period, a channel has no posts in the index, or history is shorter than the period. A metric we are not sure about is not shown at all.
18+
18+ venues are visible only in their own section: they are absent from general rankings, languages and search.
Removal from the index
An account owner or a venue admin can remove it from the index — the procedure and response time are on the removal page.