Telegram Channel Scraper: Messages, Views, Media & Polls

Telegram Channel Scraper collects messages from public Telegram channels: text, posting time, views, photos and videos, reactions, polls, forwards, links and hashtags, plus a profile for each channel with its exact subscriber count. It reads the public web preview at t.me, so it works as a Telegram API alternative with no Telegram account, no phone number and no bot token.

It reads public channels only. Private channels, groups and chats stay out of reach, and it never logs in.

What does Telegram Channel Scraper do?

Give it channel usernames (durov), @handles (@durov) or links (https://t.me/durov) and it returns one clean record per message, newest first:

• Messages: plain text (HTML optional), exact posting time, view count as a number, edit mark and author signature.
• Media: photos, videos and round videos with their length, documents and audio with file names, voice notes, stickers, locations and link previews.
• Reactions: every reaction with its count, including paid Telegram Stars, plus a total per message.
• Polls and quizzes: the question, each option with its share of the votes, and the number of voters.
• Forwards and replies: the original channel, link and message number of a forwarded post, and the message a reply answers.
• Links, hashtags, mentions and buttons pulled out of every message.
• Channel profiles: title, description, exact subscriber count, photo, verified badge, links in the description, and photo, video, file and link counts.

Why use this Telegram scraper?

• No login of any kind. No API id, no phone number, no bot token, and no account that can be banned.
• Exact subscriber counts. Profiles carry the real number (10,345,409), not the rounded "10.3M" the preview shows.
• Forward sources that are always filled in. The plain preview page sometimes blanks out "Forwarded from" names. This scraper asks for the version of the page that always includes them.
• Jump straight to a date. Ask for messages from before 1 January 2024 in a news channel that has posted over 150,000 messages, and it lands there in 18 requests instead of paging through about 3,600 pages.
• Date ranges that stop early. With "newer than", paging stops at the first older message, so you only pay for what is in range.
• Monitoring with no gaps and no repeats. Turn on "Only new messages" and schedule the run. Each run returns what was posted since the last one, oldest first, and remembers its place per channel, even when a run stops at your spending limit.
• Keyword search that keeps going. Telegram's own search stops after about 20 matches. The scraper uses it for the newest matches, then keeps reading older history and matching your words itself.
• Fast and light. Plain web requests, about 20 messages per request, 10 channels in parallel. 500 messages from 5 channels took 15 seconds in testing.
• You pay for results only. Service messages ("channel created", "message pinned"), skipped messages and errors are never charged.

On top of that you get everything the Apify platform offers: scheduled runs, an API, webhooks, run history, and exports to JSON, CSV, Excel and more.

What data can you extract from Telegram?

Field	What it holds	Example
channelUsername, channelTitle	The channel the message belongs to	durov, Pavel Durov
messageId, url	Message number and direct link	552, https://t.me/durov/552
date	Posting time, ISO 8601 in UTC	2026-10-11T14:52:40.000Z
text	Message text or caption, emoji and line breaks kept	Designers × AI ...
views	View count as a number	1040000
reactions, reactionsTotal	Each reaction with its count, and their sum	27370
media	Photos, videos, documents, audio, voice, stickers, polls, link previews	[{ "type": "video", "durationSeconds": 75 }]
poll	Question, options with vote share, voter count	{ "voters": 3270 }
forwardedFrom	Original channel, link and message number	{ "username": "designers" }
replyToMessageId	The message this one replies to	146472
links, hashtags, mentions, buttons	Everything linkable inside the message	["designers"]
subscribers (channel records)	Exact subscriber count	10345409

Every record has a type field: message for posts, channel for profiles. The full list of fields, with descriptions, is on the Dataset tab of the output.

How to scrape Telegram channels

1. Open Telegram Channel Scraper in Apify Console and click Try for free.
2. In Channels, enter usernames, @handles or t.me links, one per line.
3. Set Max messages per channel. The default is 100. Set 0 to collect only channel profiles.
4. Optionally add a date range, a search word, or turn on monitoring.
5. Click Start. When the run finishes, download the data as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it through the API.

How much does it cost to scrape Telegram?

The scraper uses pay-per-event pricing, so you pay for what you get and nothing else:

Event	Price
Message saved	$0.80 per 1,000 ($0.0008 each)
Channel profile saved	$0.001 each

A small fee per run start may also apply; the Pricing tab always shows the current prices.

Larger Apify plans pay less automatically: messages cost $0.70 per 1,000 on Scale and $0.60 on Business.

Worked examples:

• 1,000 messages from 5 channels with profiles cost 1,000 × $0.0008 + 5 × $0.001 = about $0.81.
• A monitor that runs every hour over 5 channels and finds 10 new messages each time costs about $0.008 per run, or about $5.80 a month. Turn off channel profiles in monitoring runs if you do not need a fresh subscriber count every hour.
• Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly usage, which covers about 6,000 messages.

Set Maximum cost per run in the run options to cap your spend. The scraper stops cleanly at that amount, keeps everything collected so far, and in monitoring mode the next run continues exactly where this one stopped.

Input

See the Input tab for every option. A typical input:

{
    "channels": ["durov", "@telegram", "https://t.me/bbcpersian"],
    "maxMessagesPerChannel": 200,
    "newerThan": "30 days",
    "includeChannelInfo": true
}

• Channels: usernames, @handles or links, including links to a single post. Private invite links (t.me/+...) cannot be read and are skipped with a warning.
• Only messages newer than / older than: a date (2026-10-01), a date and time in UTC (2026-10-01T12:00:00Z), or a relative value (7 days, 12 hours, 3 months). Use both for a window, such as one day of a news channel.
• Search inside each channel: one or more words; a message must contain all of them. Hashtags such as #ai work too.
• Only new messages (monitoring mode) with a Monitor name: the scraper remembers the last message delivered per channel under that name. Use one name per schedule.
• Include message HTML: adds a textHtml field with bold, links and quotes kept.
• Channels in parallel and Proxy configuration: rarely needed. Telegram's preview answers without a proxy; if it starts throttling, the scraper switches to Apify datacenter proxy by itself.

Output

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel. Three records from a real run, trimmed:

[
    {
        "type": "message",
        "channelUsername": "durov",
        "channelTitle": "Pavel Durov",
        "channelId": 1006503122,
        "messageId": 552,
        "url": "https://t.me/durov/552",
        "date": "2026-10-11T14:52:40.000Z",
        "text": "✨ Designers × AI\n\n🆕 The mockup era is over. Today’s AI tools give every designer a superpower: you can now craft your ideas, not just draw them. ...",
        "views": 1040000,
        "authorSignature": "Pavel Durov",
        "forwardedFrom": { "name": "Telegram Designers", "url": "https://t.me/designers/266", "username": "designers", "messageId": 266 },
        "replyToMessageId": null,
        "isEdited": false,
        "media": [
            { "type": "video", "url": null, "thumbnailUrl": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/o7BWfq8rgMp2Xz0pGEz2...", "durationSeconds": 75, "fileName": null, "fileSize": null, "performer": null }
        ],
        "linkPreview": null,
        "links": [],
        "hashtags": [],
        "mentions": ["designers"],
        "reactions": [
            { "emoji": "⭐", "customEmojiId": null, "isPaid": true, "count": 5720 },
            { "emoji": null, "customEmojiId": "5936157098181135162", "isPaid": false, "count": 12300 }
        ],
        "reactionsTotal": 27370,
        "poll": null,
        "buttons": [],
        "scrapedAt": "2026-10-17T23:27:14.025Z"
    },
    {
        "type": "message",
        "channelUsername": "rbc_news",
        "channelTitle": "РБК. Новости. Главное",
        "channelId": 1099860397,
        "messageId": 158878,
        "url": "https://t.me/rbc_news/158878",
        "date": "2026-10-17T11:00:04.000Z",
        "text": null,
        "views": 40800,
        "media": [{ "type": "poll", "url": "https://t.me/rbc_news/158878", "thumbnailUrl": null, "durationSeconds": null, "fileName": null, "fileSize": null, "performer": null }],
        "reactions": [
            { "emoji": "🤣", "customEmojiId": null, "isPaid": false, "count": 45 },
            { "emoji": "👍", "customEmojiId": null, "isPaid": false, "count": 5 }
        ],
        "reactionsTotal": 113,
        "poll": {
            "question": "Работодатели в этом году не спешат бронировать площадки под новогодние корпоративы. ... А что для вас корпоратив?",
            "type": "Anonymous Poll",
            "options": [
                { "text": "Возможность отдохнуть и расслабиться с коллегами", "percent": 19 },
                { "text": "Лучше премия или дополнительный выходной", "percent": 54 }
            ],
            "voters": 3270
        },
        "scrapedAt": "2026-10-17T23:27:14.221Z"
    },
    {
        "type": "channel",
        "username": "durov",
        "channelId": 1006503122,
        "title": "Pavel Durov",
        "description": "Founder of Telegram.",
        "subscribers": 10345409,
        "photoUrl": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/TJlcB2FMC5MFuE1r78AGKLAjjuxstW5Xk...",
        "isVerified": true,
        "links": [],
        "photoCount": 102,
        "videoCount": 47,
        "fileCount": 0,
        "linkCount": 200,
        "hasPublicPreview": true,
        "url": "https://t.me/durov",
        "scrapedAt": "2026-10-17T23:27:14.021Z"
    }
]

Each run also saves a SUMMARY record in its key-value store with the status of every channel (done, preview turned off, not found, not a channel, failed), the number of messages collected and the reason for any problem.

Tips for scraping Telegram

• Start small. Run 20 messages from one channel to see the data before a large run.
• Collect a period of history. Combine "newer than" and "older than". The scraper jumps to the end of the period and reads backwards only through the messages inside it.
• Follow channels. Schedule a monitoring run every hour or every day. Each channel and search word gets its own memory, so you can add channels to a monitor at any time.
• Searching for a rare word in a very large channel? Add a date range so the run reads only that period.
• Download media you want to keep. Photo and video links come from Telegram's servers and expire after a while.
• Views and reaction counts above 1,000 are rounded by Telegram ("12.4K" arrives as 12400). Subscriber counts on channel profiles are exact.
• Albums count as one message. A post with five photos is one record with five items in media.
• A channel with no messages? Its owner may have turned off the web preview. You still get its profile, and the SUMMARY record says what happened.

Integrations and API

• API: start runs and read results over HTTP from any language. See the API tab for ready-made requests.
• JavaScript:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('stratumics/telegram-channel-scraper').call({
    channels: ['durov', 'telegram'],
    maxMessagesPerChannel: 50,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.filter((item) => item.type === 'message').length);

• Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("stratumics/telegram-channel-scraper").call(
    run_input={"channels": ["durov"], "maxMessagesPerChannel": 50, "newerThan": "7 days"}
)
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item["type"] == "message":
        print(item["date"], item["views"], (item["text"] or "")[:80])

• No-code tools: connect runs to Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack or your own webhook from the Integrations tab, for example to post new messages from a monitored channel into a team chat.
• AI agents: add the Actor to any agent or chat app that supports the Model Context Protocol through the Apify MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com?tools=stratumics/telegram-channel-scraper, then ask in plain words, such as "get this week's posts from @durov with more than a million views".

FAQ

Do I need a Telegram account, phone number or bot token?

No. The scraper reads the same public preview pages anyone can open in a browser at t.me/s/<channel>.

Can it scrape private channels, groups or chats?

No. Only public channels with a web preview can be read without joining them.

How many messages can I get from one channel?

As many as the channel's public history holds. Set Max messages per channel as high as you need, or use a date range.

Why does my keyword search return few results?

A message must contain all the words you entered, at the start of a word ("bitcoin" also finds "bitcoins"). Try a single word, or check its spelling in the channel's language.

Why are a few message numbers missing?

Deleted messages leave gaps, and the photos of an album share one record. Service messages such as "channel created" are skipped.

Is it legal to scrape Telegram?

Our Actors are ethical and do not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. They only extract what the user has chosen to share publicly. We therefore believe that our Actors, when used for ethical purposes by Apify users, are safe. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data. Personal data is protected by the GDPR in the European Union and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers.

This scraper reads public channel posts only. Posts can still name people: author signatures, mentions and forward sources are personal data in some cases, so collect and keep only what you need. Telegram is a trademark of its owner, and this tool is not affiliated with or endorsed by Telegram.

Something looks wrong. Where do I report it?

Open an issue on the Issues tab with the run link and the channel. Most problems can be reproduced and fixed quickly.

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