Spread posts: why the audience of Telegram channels is growing again
On April 17, Telegram started working for some Russians without using VPNs and proxies, this mainly affected Android users with a Telegram Premium subscription. Following this, user activity began to grow, according to data from the Telemetr service. However, experts note that the return of the audience to the messenger has been taking place for 1-2 weeks and directly correlates with the growing popularity of legal circumvention tools. For example, the largest Russian-language Telegram channels lost subscribers in March, but since the beginning of April they have increased their audience by tens and even hundreds of thousands of people.
The audience returns to Telegram
After Telegram started working without a VPN and proxy for some Russian users on April 17, a sharp surge in activity was recorded in the messenger, according to data from the Telemetr service. This was reflected not only in the growth of the channels' audience, but also in the change in the structure of consumption — users read posts more often, subscribe to new sources and actively switch to services within the platform, new media experts explained.
Izvestia also studied the audience statistics of the largest Russian-language Telegram channels and confirmed the trend of a certain recovery in the number of subscribers after the drop that was observed in March and early April.
For example, this happened with the Telegram channel, the leader of the TGStat rating service. By April 8, the number of subscribers had decreased from a peak of 4.5 million to 3.4 million (-24.4%). However, by the evening of April 17, the channel had regained about 400,000 people.
The Leonardo Diver entertainment channel (3rd place in the top 10) had lost much less by April 13 - 79 thousand out of 5.2 million (1.5%), but then it also began to gradually restore the audience — it increased by 5.5 thousand.
The information channel "Moscow is interesting" (11th place in the top) lost 18.8 thousand out of 3.4 million users in the first 10 days of April alone, but then returned 5.3 thousand. Approximately the same trend can be seen in other channels.
If we look at the audience growth only for April 17, the leaders here were the Trends of the Year channel dedicated to marketing and PR, which added 68.4 thousand subscribers (+14.6%), the Yandex Browser Team — +32.4 thousand (8.7%) and the Mash news channel — +27.5 thousand (0.9%).
— In general, the dynamics of April 17 shows several key trends at once. First, the growth has affected almost all categories, from news to highly specialized channels, which indicates a systemic effect rather than local spikes. Secondly, the returning audience is heterogeneous: some users are actively involved in the content, while others are limited to subscriptions without further interaction," a market participant explained in an interview with Izvestia.
However, some experts noted that as early as April 17, it became clear that the media had somewhat exaggerated the scale of restoring access to Telegram. The majority of messenger users reported that Telegram was still unavailable without using a VPN and proxy. Vasily Cherny, Director of Strategic Communications at Brand Analytics, noted that, according to the company, there had been no significant increase in the messenger's audience over the past 24 hours.
It's not banned yet
The audience that left Telegram after the blocking began began to return there before April 17, experts say. Roman Permyakov, head of the analytical center "G.U.R.U.", illustrated this trend by watching the official channels of the heads of Russian regions. According to the research "Index. Telegram", conducted using neural network analysis methods, in the period from March 15 to April 1, against the background of the active phase of the "slowdown" of the messenger, these views decreased by an average of 17%. However, in the next two weeks, some of the audience returned, and from April 2 to April 16, the indicator gained about 5%.
According to Permyakov, Telegram in this situation "actually repeated the "fell and did push-ups" formula, demonstrating the ability to quickly restore user activity. The return of 5% of the audience is equivalent to about 5 million users, which directly correlates with the growing popularity of legal circumvention tools, the expert emphasized.
— The use of VPN services that are not blacklisted by Roskomnadzor remains legal, and their audience is much wider than is commonly believed. Such solutions are in demand not only in the context of information security or circumvention of locks, but also in everyday life, for example, to access familiar foreign services," he explained.
Russian users and specialists are still forced to work with a number of foreign services through VPNs and alternative channels, and this practice will continue in the near future, said political scientist Elena Shtulman. At the same time, such a model, according to her, remains economically inefficient: by paying for access through bypass mechanisms, users can actually withdraw funds outside the Russian jurisdiction.
"It would be more rational to create a legal access infrastructure through Russian operators and platforms with the ability to pay with domestic tools and partnerships with foreign services," she said.
Otherwise, Shtulman warns, digital inequality may increase: some of the audience will "buy themselves a normal Internet," while the rest will be forced to either abandon their usual services or use unstable solutions. This, in turn, creates a favorable environment for fraud, from pseudo-VPNs to fictitious access services. An increase in fraud is already being recorded, related, for example, to the sale of fake Telegram Premium subscriptions, which supposedly ensure the stable operation of the messenger.
— After there was talk in the information field about the possible unfreezing of Telegram, we recorded a surge in the activity of intruders. They instantly adapted to the new agenda, and now we see at least three major areas of their work, which include the massive creation of bot farms, the sale of fake Telegram Premium subscriptions, and the distribution of messenger accelerators," said Igor Bederov, head of the Internet Search company. — The hype around Telegram will last for some time, and scammers will continue to use it. The task of users is to maintain critical thinking. Anything that promises "free Premium" or "bypass locks" with a 99% probability.
The key task now is not so much to tighten restrictions as to form a balanced regulatory model that preserves access to technology and does not slow down the development of the digital economy, Elena Shtulman believes.
At the same time, all the experts interviewed by Izvestia recommended caution in any form of interaction with VPNs. So, back in December 2025, the Novomoskovsky District Court of the Tula region recognized its use as an aggravating circumstance during the consideration of a criminal case on the illegal purchase of drugs on a large scale.
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