Telegram Channel Reader

Read public Telegram channels as clean, agent-ready data. You give it channel usernames or t.me links. It returns one row per post with:

• the original text and a normalized version
• detected language, with a confidence score
• links, hashtags and mentions
• views and reactions
• media type, poll questions and options
• forward source and reply target
• duplicate detection across the channels in a run

Monitoring mode returns only the posts that are new since your last run.

Built for AI agents and for people who track news across languages. Text handling is tuned for Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and English, and language detection covers 176 languages.

What you get

• Agent-ready rows. Every post row has the same flat set of fields, with null where something does not apply.
• Clean text. text_normalized has invisible characters and right-to-left control marks removed. Persian and Arabic letter variants (ي/ی, ك/ک) and digits (۱۲۳ / ١٢٣ → 123) are unified, and Persian half-spaces (ZWNJ) are kept where they belong. The original text is always kept as well.
• Language detection per post, with a confidence score.
• Monitoring mode (onlyNew): a checkpoint is kept per channel, so the next run returns only newer posts.
• Clear failures. A missing, private or empty channel returns one error row with a reason and is never charged.

Media files are not downloaded. The media_type field tells you what each post contains.

Input

Field	Default	What it does
channels	required	Usernames or links: durov, @durov, https://t.me/durov, https://t.me/s/durov, https://t.me/durov/123
maxMessagesPerChannel	50	Newest posts to return per channel (1–5000)
onlyNew	false	Return only posts newer than the previous run with the same stateName
stateName	default	Name of the checkpoint set, so separate monitors don't interfere
newerThan	–	Skip older posts: 2026-10-01, an ISO date-time, or 3 days / 12 hours
proxyConfiguration	off	Optional proxy for fetching t.me

Example input

{
  "channels": ["durov", "https://t.me/bbcpersian", "@meduzalive"],
  "maxMessagesPerChannel": 20,
  "onlyNew": true,
  "stateName": "morning-brief"
}

Output

Every row has a row_type:

row_type	Meaning	Charged
message	One post	free during early access
error	Bad input, unavailable or empty channel, fetch failure	no
notice	Expected outcome, e.g. no_new_messages in monitoring mode	no

Posts come out oldest first within each channel.

Example message row (real output, text shortened)

{
  "row_type": "message",
  "channel": "durov",
  "channel_title": "Pavel Durov",
  "message_id": 548,
  "url": "https://t.me/durov/548",
  "date": "2026-09-11T16:04:02+00:00",
  "text": "🤝 Telegram has become the sponsor of Codeforces — the largest competitive programming platform in the world. …",
  "text_normalized": "🤝 Telegram has become the sponsor of Codeforces — the largest competitive programming platform in the world. …",
  "language": "en",
  "language_confidence": 0.9822,
  "translation": null,
  "translation_language": null,
  "views": 2120000,
  "reactions": [{"emoji": "paid_star", "count": 21400}, {"emoji": "custom:5399847211989246390", "count": 32500}],
  "reactions_total": 72300,
  "media_type": null,
  "media_count": 0,
  "links": ["https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/156620"],
  "hashtags": [],
  "mentions": [],
  "forwarded_from_name": null,
  "forwarded_from_channel": null,
  "forwarded_from_url": null,
  "forwarded_from_author": null,
  "reply_to_message_id": null,
  "link_preview_url": "https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/156620",
  "link_preview_title": "Telegram Returns as Title Sponsor of Codeforces!",
  "poll_question": null,
  "poll_options": [],
  "poll_voters": null,
  "author_signature": "Pavel Durov",
  "edited": false,
  "is_service": false,
  "duplicate_of": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-07T12:25:49+00:00"
}

translation and translation_language are reserved for the planned translation add-on and are always null for now.

Example error row

{
  "row_type": "error",
  "channel": "thischanneldoesnotexist_zz9q",
  "input": "thischanneldoesnotexist_zz9q",
  "error_code": "channel_unavailable",
  "error_message": "@thischanneldoesnotexist_zz9q has no public web preview: it does not exist, is private, is a user or bot rather than a channel, or has the preview turned off.",
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-07T12:25:49+00:00"
}

Error codes: invalid_input, invalid_channel, channel_unavailable, channel_empty, fetch_failed. Notice codes: no_new_messages, translation_unavailable.

Pricing

Free during early access: you only pay Apify's usual platform usage for your own runs. Pay-per-event pricing (per returned post) may be introduced later. Error and notice rows will always be free.

Limits, stated plainly

• Public channels with a web preview only. The data comes from https://t.me/s/<channel>, the same page anyone sees without logging in. Private channels, groups, users, bots and channels whose owners turned off the preview return channel_unavailable.
• Views are rounded the way Telegram shows them (18.9M → 18900000). Telegram's web preview does not show forward counts, so there is no such field.
• An album is one row (media_type: "album", media_count = number of items), identified by its first message id.
• In monitoring mode, if more than maxMessagesPerChannel new posts arrived since the last run, only the newest ones are returned. Raise the limit or run more often.
• No translation yet. Posts come back in their original language. Translation is planned as an add-on once it is reliable on fresh news.

Privacy

Only content that channels publish openly is read. No logins, no member lists, no private groups, and nothing beyond what the public channel page shows.