Telegram Channel Monitor — Messages, Views & Keyword Alerts

Scrape and monitor public Telegram channels — no Telegram API key, no login, no phone number.

Give it channel usernames, get clean structured JSON: messages with text, dates, view counts, links and media flags, plus channel subscriber counts. Add keywords to filter, enable incremental mode and put it on a schedule to build a Telegram monitoring & alerting pipeline in minutes.

Why this Actor?

• ✅ No Telegram API credentials — works with public channel previews, zero setup
• ✅ Keyword filtering — only get messages that mention your brand, token, product or topic
• ✅ Incremental monitoring — onlyNewMessages remembers where it stopped; each scheduled run returns only what's new
• ✅ Channel stats included — subscriber counts and channel metadata with every run
• ✅ Fair pay-per-result billing — a channel is only charged when it delivers messages after your filters; empty checks on a schedule cost you nothing

Use cases

• Brand & reputation monitoring — know when your product, company or founder is mentioned
• Crypto / market intelligence — track announcement channels and signal groups (public ones)
• OSINT & research — archive messages with views, dates and links as structured data
• Competitor watching — follow competitors' announcement channels automatically
• News aggregation — feed fresh posts from niche channels into your own pipeline or AI agent

Input

{
    "channels": ["durov", "telegram"],
    "maxMessagesPerChannel": 50,
    "keywords": ["launch", "update"],
    "onlyNewMessages": true,
    "includeChannelInfo": true
}

• channels — usernames or t.me/... links of public channels
• maxMessagesPerChannel — up to 1000 recent messages per channel
• keywords — optional case-insensitive filter; leave empty to get everything
• onlyNewMessages — incremental mode for scheduled monitoring
• includeChannelInfo — adds one summary item per channel (title, description, subscribers)

Output

One dataset item per message:

{
    "type": "message",
    "channel": "durov",
    "id": 538,
    "url": "https://t.me/durov/538",
    "date": "2026-08-04T10:12:00+00:00",
    "text": "Last night, Apple briefly removed Telegram from the App Store...",
    "views": 1380000,
    "isForwarded": false,
    "forwardedFrom": null,
    "hasPhoto": false,
    "hasVideo": false,
    "hasDocument": false,
    "links": []
}

Plus one channel info item per channel:

{
    "type": "channel-info",
    "channel": "durov",
    "title": "Pavel Durov",
    "subscribers": 11300000,
    "description": "Thoughts from the Telegram founder"
}

Private channels, bots and user accounts have no public preview — the Actor reports them clearly as channel-error items instead of failing the whole run.

Build a monitoring pipeline in 3 steps

1. Set your channels + keywords, enable onlyNewMessages
2. Create an Apify Schedule (e.g. every 30 minutes)
3. Connect a webhook or integration (Slack, email, Make, Zapier, or your own endpoint) to get alerted on new matching messages

FAQ

Does it work with private channels or groups? No — only channels with a public preview (t.me/s/...). This keeps the Actor login-free and reliable.

Do I need a Telegram account or API key? No. Nothing to configure.

How fresh is the data? Messages are scraped live at run time, including view counts at that moment.