A month after blocking Telegram: what has changed?

On April 13, the Tagansky court of Moscow ruled to block the Telegram messenger in Russia. The matter came to court very quickly - on April 12, Roskomnadzor asked to immediately block Telegram and the next day permission was granted. Moreover, the meeting was held in an on-line mode - it took just 18 minutes to do everything.

A lot of interesting things happened during this month. In particular, blocking thousands of IP addresses from different subbands has led to inoperabilityon the territory of the Russian Federation, hundreds (and according to experts - thousands) of sites and services. But was the game worth the candle? In other words, did Roskomnadzor achieve its goal of drastically reducing the popularity of the messenger among Russian citizens? Judging by the latest data, although the effect of the locks is there, it is very insignificant.

So, according to SimilarWeb, on May 14, Telegram was installed on about a fifth of Android devices running in Russia. Unfortunately, there are no statistics on iOS, but the analytical agency Deloitte cites data that 70% of mobile phone users in the Russian Federation deal specifically with Android.

Alphabet users of gadgets with a mobile operating system from Alphabet use Telegram quite actively, writesRBC. True, if in April about half of the users who installed it worked with the messenger (meaning active users, and not all who have Telegram installed), then in May this figure was already 31.7%. In addition, the download volume also fell. In April, it was 102 thousand downloads, now 40.5 thousand.

Another statistics, this time from App Annie, shows that Telegram in the list of the most downloaded applications fell from fifth place to 19th in the App Store and by 27 on google play.

At the same time, the audience of Telegram channels is not decreasing, but increasing. On average, Russian-language channels show an audience growth of about 20% per month (on average for a number of channels).


Source: Tgstat

According to Tgstat, the percentage of active Telegram audience decreased by only 7 percentage points per month. This data was obtained after analyzing the activity of three million subscribers of Russian-language channels (those who were online in the last week and after blocking). It seems to be a little, but it may well be that the real indicator is even lower. The change takes into account the natural decrease in users, and if you make an adjustment for this, comparing with foreign channels, where the decrease is about 5% (their users are not subject to blocking in any way), then the real decrease in activity in the Russian Federation was about 2%.

The number of views per day decreased by about 15%. This is not a critical indicator at all, since some large channels claim, on the contrary, about an increase in the number of views. The May holidays could have an impact on this indicator - for example, on New Year's holidays the drop in views was about 28%. Yes, May holidays are not as popular as New Year's, so 15% is a likely consequence of the craze for barbecue and resorts when few people actively use Telegram.

The average number of posts per day fell by about 2%. This is an insignificant result, which is more like a statistical error.

As for the interest of advertisers in Telegram channels, according to Combot, then, as far as one can judge, it is growing. Liza Aprelskaya, Combot’s commercial director, says: “At the very beginning of the Telegram blocking story, a number of large clients stopped the placement - but quickly reconsidered their decision.

According to experts, the messenger practically did not lose users due to the availability of tools to bypass locks. “This is not just an obvious sensation - together with TGStat.ru we measured the coverage of posts with instructions on how to bypass the block, thousands of records are counted. Moreover, the creators of proxy bots write about the high prevalence of their solutions: only our @ socks5_bot provides blocking bypass for more than a million Russians, ”says Anton Protsenko, head of Content and Analytics at Combot.

At the same time, losses of Russian companies due to the actions of Roskomnadzor amounted to about a billion US dollars. According to Medusa, about 117 million rubles are spent per year on a system for recording data on locks. Naturally, these funds are provided by taxpayers. Is it worth it? A rhetorical question.