The volume of the Telegram advertising market in Russian Telegram channels grew by 70% to $285M in 2021

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In early January 2022, Telega.io, the Telegram advertising platform in partnership with Professor Dmitry Kornilov, Doctor of Economics, completed a large-scale study titled "The Advertising Market in Russian-language Telegram Channels in 2021.

Telega.in is an advertising platform on Telegram for the CIS. Telega.io is a platform for the international market. The platform brings together advertisers and owners of Telegram channels.

The study shows quarter-by-quarter growth in the market and a positive change in key metrics compared to 2020.

Amount of the ad posts

In 2021, the Russian Telegram audience was constantly growing, exceeding 50 million in September. That has led to a growing number of new channels, posts, and views.

The growth rate of the posts from 2019 to 2021 was 310%, which means that the number of posts in 2021 increased by 3.1 compared to 2019.

Advertising cost

In 2021, the average CPM (cost per 1,000 views) for all categories approximately doubled from $6,1(Q1), $9,27 (Q2), $11,22 (Q3), to $12,85 (Q4).

The first three positions in the Top 10 most expensive topics according to CPM at the end of 2021 are dedicated to finances, as it was at the beginning of the year.

Significantly, there was intense CPM growth in some topics - the indicator increased by up to 7 times. We believe this phenomenal growth is caused primarily by a lack of high-quality author channels in popular topics. The importance of this factor is further enhanced by a significant increase in advertisers' interest in Telegram.

Ad turnover by categories

In 2021, the top 10 categories by number of orders make 51.1% of the total number of advertising posts in Telegram channels on the service https://telega.in

Other - 8,35%
Movies - 7,99%
Humor and Memes - 6.24%
Business and Startups - 5,07%
Recreation and Entertainment - 4,60%
News & Media - 4,43%
Motivation and self-development - 4,12%
Sport - 3,57%
Music - 3,36%

The top 10 categories by ad turnover make 56.1% of the total value of ad posts:

Investments - 12,86%;
Business and Startups - 9,87%;
Cryptocurrencies - 6,09%;
Marketing and PR - 5,16%;
News & Media - 4,91%;
Internet technologies - 4,61%;
Economics & Finance - 3,91%;
Blogs - 2,94%;
Other - 2,88%;
Motivation and self-development - 2,84%.

The difference between the categories in the top 10 by the number of ad post orders and the top 10 by ad turnover is related to the pricing policy of the channels in the categories. Among the leaders by several orders, there are categories with relatively low CPM values, and among the leaders by ad turnover, there are categories with high CPM values.