Telegram Channel Scraper

Scrape public Telegram channels without authentication — no API ID, no API hash, no phone number, no session files. Uses Telegram's public web preview (t.me/s/channel) to extract messages, views, reactions, media URLs, forwards, polls, and link previews.

Why this actor?

Every other Telegram scraper on Apify Store requires you to provide a Telegram API ID + API hash and often a phone number, which creates two major problems:

1. You need to set up a personal Telegram dev account.
2. Your account gets flagged/banned for scraping activity.

This actor avoids both — it uses only public, unauthenticated endpoints. Trade-off: you can't scrape private channels, and message counts like exact views on very old messages may be approximations.

Features

• Zero credentials — no API keys, no phone number
• Full message data — text, views, date, author, forwards, replies
• Reactions — emoji + count for each reaction (including paid ⭐ reactions)
• Media extraction — photo URLs, video sources, documents, voice messages
• Polls — question + options
• Link previews — URL, title, description, site name
• Channel metadata — subscriber count, verified status, description
• Historical pagination — goes back in time via ?before=<msg_id> until the limit you set
• Date filtering — fromDate, toDate to narrow scope

Input

Field	Type	Description
channels	array	List of public channels — accepts @username, t.me/username, t.me/s/username
maxMessagesPerChannel	integer	Stop after this many messages per channel
fromDate	string	ISO date — skip messages older than this
toDate	string	ISO date — skip messages newer than this
includeMedia	boolean	Include media URLs in output
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional — t.me rarely blocks, but useful for very high volume

Example input

{
    "channels": ["@durov", "@telegram", "@breakingmash"],
    "maxMessagesPerChannel": 500,
    "fromDate": "2025-01-01",
    "includeMedia": true
}

Output

Each message:

{
    "channel": "durov",
    "messageId": 497,
    "url": "https://t.me/durov/497",
    "date": "2026-04-20T22:55:10+00:00",
    "text": "France's Agency for Secure Documents was hacked...",
    "author": "Pavel Durov",
    "views": 713000,
    "isForwarded": false,
    "forwardedFrom": null,
    "replyToUrl": null,
    "photos": ["https://cdn4.telesco.pe/..."],
    "videos": [],
    "documents": [],
    "voices": [],
    "poll": null,
    "reactions": [
        { "emoji": "⭐", "count": 4820, "paid": true },
        { "emoji": "custom:5265077361648368841", "emojiId": "5265077361648368841", "count": 27600 }
    ],
    "linkPreview": null,
    "hasMedia": false
}

Pricing (Pay-per-result)

• $0.30 per 1000 messages extracted

Use cases

• Social listening — monitor brand/keyword mentions across dozens of channels
• News aggregation — pull latest posts from news channels into your own feed
• Crypto/finance — track announcements from project channels
• Market research — compare engagement (views, reactions) across channels
• Competitive intelligence — monitor competitor channels
• Dataset building — collect training data for NLP / sentiment analysis

Limitations

• Public channels only (groups and private channels are not supported)
• View counts for very old messages may be approximate (Telegram rounds them)
• Reaction emojis that use Telegram's custom emoji system come back as custom:<emoji_id> — resolve via Telegram's Bot API if you need the visual emoji

Notes

Respect Telegram's Terms of Service and the laws in your jurisdiction. This actor reads the same public data anyone can see in a web browser.