Telegram Channel Scraper — Views & Engagement Rate

Scrape posts from any public Telegram channel and get the number every other Telegram scraper throws away: how many people actually saw each post.

Telegram publishes a view counter on every post in a public channel, and a subscriber counter in the channel header. Divide one by the other and you have the only honest measure of a channel's reach. Every scraper on the store returns the messages and drops the counter.

No account, no API token, no phone number, no MTProto. This reads the same logged-out public web preview any browser can see.

What you get that a normal Telegram scraper cannot give you

Engagement rate. Median views as a percentage of subscribers. A channel with 600,000 subscribers and a median of 3,000 views has an engagement rate of 0.5% — the audience is not there. That single number is why this actor exists.

Measured live on 2026-08-14: @durov sits at 54% engagement (11.2M subscribers, 6.06M median views) and @telegram at 14%. Both healthy. A bought audience typically lands under 1%.

Median, not mean. One viral post drags a mean far above what a typical post reaches, which is exactly the distortion you are trying to see through.

Reach trend. Median views of the newer half of the sample against the older half. Reach decays long before the subscriber count does, because subscribers rarely unsubscribe — they just stop opening it. @durov measured −66% across the sampled window while his subscriber count kept climbing.

Best posting hour. The UTC hour whose posts reach the highest median views, counting only hours with at least two posts so a single lucky post cannot win.

What the channel actually promotes. Every outbound link is extracted and rolled up by domain. Links back into Telegram are excluded — they are the platform's own chrome, not a promoted destination.

Forward attribution. When a post is a forward, the source channel is captured, so you can see whose content a channel amplifies.

Who uses this

• Crypto and market intel — verifying whether a channel's audience is real before paying for a placement.
• Brand and PR monitoring — tracking mentions and their genuine reach.
• OSINT and research — mapping which channels amplify which sources.
• Media buyers — comparing channels on reach per subscriber rather than on a subscriber count anyone can inflate.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
channels	array	["durov"]	Accepts durov, @durov, t.me/durov or the full URL
maxPostsPerChannel	integer	100	Telegram serves 20 posts per page; 100 is five fetches
includePosts	boolean	true	Turn off for analysis rows only
includeAnalysis	boolean	true	The engagement analysis row
since	string	""	ISO date; paging stops once a whole page falls before it
searchText	string	""	Keep posts containing this text
minViews	integer	0	Keep posts at or above this view count
withLinksOnly	boolean	false	Keep only posts carrying an outbound link

Filters shape the post rows only. The analysis is always computed on every post collected — otherwise a minViews: 10000 filter would make every channel look like it reaches 10,000 people.

Output

Three row types, distinguished by type.

channel — title, description, subscriber count, lifetime photo/video/link counts. Free; it is context for the analysis, not a second product.

channel_analysis — medianViews, engagementRate, engagementBand, viewsTrendPercent, postsPerDay, bestHourUtc, topPostUrl, mediaSharePercent, linkSharePercent, forwardSharePercent, topLinkDomains, topForwardSources, topHashtags.

post — postUrl, date, text, views, linkDomains, hashtags, mentions, mediaTypes, isForwarded, forwardedFrom, isReply.

Engagement bands: dead under 1%, low 1–10%, healthy 10–30%, high 30–70%, exceptional above 70%.

Reliability

• Counters are abbreviated. Telegram renders 11.5M, not 11,500,000. Those are resolved to integers, and viewsAreRounded tells you when the underlying figure was abbreviated and is therefore accurate to about three significant figures rather than exact.
• A private channel returns HTTP 200 with an empty page, not a 404. Verified 2026-08-14 across several handles. Those are reported as skipped with a reason rather than silently returning nothing.
• One channel failing never fails the run.

Limits

• Public channels only. Private channels and groups are invisible to the web preview by design, and there is no way to ask it for one.
• View counts are Telegram's own and are abbreviated above 1,000.
• Reactions and comment counts are not in the public preview.

Pricing

Pay per event. $0.001 per post, $0.05 per channel analysis. The channel row is free.