Once relatively under the radar, messaging app Telegram has recently surged into the spotlight following the arrest of its CEO, Pavel Durov. While it’s attracted little attention in the West until now, it has around a billion users worldwide, and is one of the fastest-growing social media apps in the world.
Its growth is especially remarkable given that it's run by a team of fewer than 50 people and has been completely organic – Telegram has never done any kind of paid advertising to promote the app.
Accurate and reliable information about it can be hard to come by, but at GWI, we’ve been tracking Telegram in our Core survey since 2015, so we’ve got a pretty good view on who uses it and why. Read on to explore who exactly uses it, where it’s most popular, and what motivates its users.
Here’s everything you need to know about Telegram.
Telegram is a cloud-based, cross-platform social media and instant messaging app. Its core functionality is broadly similar to WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, or Viber. It was founded by Pavel Durov in 2013, a Russian entrepreneur who had already set up the social network VK (sometimes referred to as the Russian Facebook).
Telegram has around 1 billion users around the world.
Telegram is a cloud-based app, meaning all messages and media are stored on its servers, rather than individual devices. This is what allows the app to be used seamlessly across different devices.
Messages can be sent to other Telegram users, in groups, or on Channels – one-way communication tools where admins post messages to an unlimited number of subscribers.
By default, Telegram offers encryption between a message sender and its servers, meaning that third-parties cannot see messages, though technically Telegram has access to them. Users can opt in to “Secret Chats”, which are end-to-end encrypted, which Telegram can’t see at all.
While its broad functionality is largely the same as other apps, Telegram’s features and market positioning make it stand out from the competition.
Telegram stores messages and media in the cloud, allowing users to access conversations across multiple devices, without using storage space on their phone. Compared to other apps like WhatsApp and Signal, it’s also more flexible with file sizes and group chats. Users can send much bigger files to each other than most competitor apps, and Channels and Supergroups allow users to send messages to more people at once. This advantage in one-to-many communication makes it attractive for content creators and news publications who want to update many people simultaneously.
Telegram also positions itself as a privacy-focused app, though there’s nuance to this. Some privacy experts argue that because its encryption isn’t open-source and not turned on by default, it’s not as secure as other apps like WhatsApp or Signal. On the other hand, you could argue that Telegram distinguishes itself by promising never to share any user data with governments or law enforcement. David Thiel, chief technologist at the Stanford Internet Observatory, says that Telegram markets user privacy and free speech not through its technology, but by its behavior.
This might change, though. Shortly after his arrest, Pavel Durov announced an update to the platform’s terms of service and privacy policy which will hand over metadata to authorities who have search warrants or other valid legal requests.
This might have a negative impact on brand perception, but then again – privacy might not actually be that big of a deal in deciding whether people use it or not.
Is privacy the main reason people use it? It’d be easy to assume so, but as is often the case with consumer research, there’s often a bit more to it. The actual reasons consumers adopt it can be quite different, and sometimes even surprising.
The main reason why people use Telegram – like any social media service – is because other people are on it. We know from our GWI USA data set that the most popular reason to use social media by far is “keeping in touch with friends / family”. Network effects (where the value of a service goes up the more people use it) are extremely powerful, which is why creating a new social media service from the ground up is incredibly hard.
4 in 10 consumers outside of China use Telegram. If we take an audience of people who worry about how companies use their personal data, it’s still 4 in 10 that use it. In other words, how you feel about privacy makes little difference to whether or not you use the app.
So if Telegram’s biggest users aren’t privacy-conscious consumers, who are they?
Following Durov’s arrest, attention turned to criminal or unethical activities that take place on the platform. But the app’s user base is enormous – almost a billion monthly active users in total. The vast majority of these will be using Telegram for the same reasons that people use most social media apps – for the quite mundane reasons of talking to friends and family. As Durov himself puts it, “99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime”.
If you exclude China (which has a very different social media ecosystem), Telegram is currently used by 43% of the global online population. It’s been one of the fastest-growing services worldwide in the last few years, with its number of users rising by 31% since 2020.
As it’s not one of the most-used messaging apps in the UK or US, it’s easy to overlook how popular it is in other parts of the world. It’s used by over half the online population in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil, while in its native Russia, over three-quarters use it, making it the most popular messaging app in the country overall.
While it’s most popular in the global south, it’s made inroads in other parts of the world. In Italy, for example, it’s used by 47% of consumers. And while Western markets have been slower to adopt, Telegram is seeing some of its biggest growth in the English-speaking world, with its user base more than doubling in Canada and the UK since 2020.
The Telegram audience is a classic early adopter type – predominantly young men in cities who have a high level of education. They’re consumers who see themselves as ambitious, adventurous risk-takers – with an interest in tech, who often work in tech themselves, and are comfortable taking the plunge with new products and services like cryptocurrency. The professions most likely to use it are software developers (53%) and web developers (52%).
With Telegram’s strong growth in the last few years, the app has started to expand from its base of early adopters to other groups. Here are some audiences seeing particularly quick uptake of the app (with the % growth of each audience’s Telegram users since 2020):
While arresting a platform’s CEO is a significant escalation, it’s unlikely to be the last word in a long-standing debate around social media – where does free speech end and user safety begin?
It’s a situation where consumers would like to have their cake and eat it too. 62% think free speech extends to online spaces (like social media), but 50% of consumers think governments should oversee content produced on these kinds of platforms. Consumers want the freedom to say what they want online, but a good number also want the authorities to step in to protect them from harmful content.
It’s a difficult bind without an obvious solution. The only thing that’s certain is whatever happens with Telegram, it’s not the last we’ll hear about this topic.
Pavel Durov’s arrest has made Telegram a lightning rod for broader topics. Even before this latest flashpoint, regulators had called for the app to be banned or implemented temporary blocks.
But Telegram is just one part of a much bigger puzzle. The vast majority of its user base use it for pretty standard reasons. It’s an important communication tool for hundreds of millions of people around the world, notably on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Its focus on privacy and historic refusal to hand over user data is what allows it to be used by political dissidents, as it was in Belarus following a contested election in 2020. In Uzbekistan, Telegram is an important layer of communication for businesses, organizations and even the President to communicate with people.
Even in the worst-case scenario, whereby Telegram becomes permanently blocked in particular jurisdictions, it’s likely that many bad actors on the platform will simply move elsewhere.
Every user will have their own reasons, but the general explanation is the same for any other social media app – its users feel it provides a better service than its competitors, and because other people are on it. While privacy is a cornerstone of its marketing, it’s unlikely to be a decisive factor for most.
Like other messaging apps, Telegram has additional functionality to texting services – for example, it’s easier to share large files on the app.
It’s also likely that in some parts of the world, messaging apps are preferred to texting because they’re more cost-effective. Whereas text messages may be charged per message sent through the cellular network, messages sent through an app are distributed through the internet, and so are covered by a data bundle, or wifi. In practice, this makes them a more affordable option for many.
It depends how you define it. On a technical level, it doesn’t offer the always-on encryption that other messaging apps do, and its encryption isn’t regarded as highly as other offerings. But on the other hand, some users may feel it’s Telegram’s behavior – promising not to share any data with third parties – that guarantees their security. But this may be complicated by the app changing its terms of service following Durov’s arrest, whereby metadata can be shared with authorities that possess search warrants.