Telegram Channel Scraper

📨 Scrape public Telegram channels and groups — messages, views, reactions, photos, videos, and forwarded content. No API key, no login, no Telegram account required.

✨ Features

• 🔓 No credentials needed — scrapes public channel web previews
• 📄 Full message data — text, HTML, date, views, reactions, forwards
• 🖼️ Media detection — photo URLs, video thumbnails from Telegram CDN
• 📊 Channel metadata — title, description, subscriber count
• 📖 Pagination — automatically loads channel history page by page
• 🔗 Flexible input — accepts t.me/channel, t.me/s/channel, or just the username

🚀 How It Works

This Actor scrapes Telegram's public channel web preview pages (t.me/s/<channel>) using standard HTTP requests. No Telegram API credentials or bot tokens are required — it works the same way your browser does when viewing a public channel.

📥 Input Parameters

Parameter	Required	Default	Description
start_urls	✅	—	List of Telegram channel URLs to scrape
max_messages	No	100	Max messages per channel (0 = unlimited)
include_media_urls	No	true	Include photo/video thumbnail URLs in output

Supported URL Formats

All of these work:

• https://t.me/durov
• https://t.me/s/durov
• durov (just the username)

📤 Sample Output

{
    "channel": "durov",
    "channel_title": "Pavel Durov",
    "channel_subscribers": "10.4M subscribers",
    "message_id": 457,
    "message_url": "https://t.me/durov/457",
    "date": "2025-11-15T16:06:11+00:00",
    "text": "We're starting to test new Telegram features such as live-streaming in Stories and auctions for gifts...",
    "text_html": "<div class=\"tgme_widget_message_text\">...</div>",
    "views": "4.18M",
    "forwarded_from": null,
    "author": null,
    "has_photo": false,
    "has_video": false,
    "reaction_counts": ["12K", "5.2K", "890"],
    "fetched_at": "2025-03-21T12:00:00"
}

📊 Output Fields

Field	Type	Description
channel	string	Channel username
channel_title	string	Channel display name
channel_subscribers	string	Subscriber count (human-readable)
message_id	number	Unique message ID within the channel
message_url	string	Direct link to the message
date	string	ISO 8601 timestamp
text	string	Plain text content
text_html	string	HTML-formatted message content
views	string	View count (human-readable, e.g., "4.18M")
forwarded_from	string	Original source if message was forwarded
author	string	Author name (for group messages)
has_photo	boolean	Whether message contains photos
has_video	boolean	Whether message contains videos
photo_urls	array	Photo URLs from Telegram CDN (if include_media_urls is true)
video_thumbnail_urls	array	Video thumbnail URLs (if include_media_urls is true)
reaction_counts	array	Reaction counts per emoji
fetched_at	string	When the data was scraped

⚡ Notes

• Public channels only — private channels and groups require Telegram API credentials (not supported by this Actor).
• Rate limiting — the Actor uses a 1.5-second delay between page loads and handles Telegram's 429 responses automatically.
• Memory — uses minimal memory (~128MB). Default Apify settings are sufficient.
• ~20 messages per page — scraping 1000 messages takes approximately 50 page loads (~75 seconds).
• Media URLs are Telegram CDN links (cdn*.telesco.pe) — they may expire after some time.