Media monitoring website says traffic to Telegram channels dropped 76.5 percent after Russia blocked the app

A new report by the monitoring website Medialogia claims that traffic to Telegram’s channels fell by 76.5 percent in the week after Russia started blocking the instant messenger. Medialogia says it counted the number of views on posts by the network’s 158,000 most active channels between April 16 (when Roskomnadzor started blocking Telegram) and April 23, finding that the total fell from almost 47 million to just more than 11 million.

The same study found that traffic to Telegram’s “top 100 channels” was more resilient, falling only 23 percent. These top channels have also gone from making up just seven percent of Telegram’s overall channel views to a whopping 24 percent.

Another monitoring website called Telegram Analytics has objected to Medialogia’s methodology. On April 23, Telegram Analytics published research showing that subscriptions to Russian Telegram channels grew 23 percent between April 8 and 22, and the cumulative reach of this content grew by 15 percent. Telegram Analytics tracks 40,000 Russian-language Telegram channels that draw 140-200 million daily views.

“So they’ve got four times more channels, but three times fewer views? What gives?” Telegram Analytics wrote on Wednesday, also faulting Medialogia for using April 16 (the first day that Russia started blocking Telegram) as a basis of comparison. “Activity on the channels that day was crazy. The number of views was 30 million higher than usual,” Telegram Analytics says. The website also suspects that Medialogia counted views on channels that aren’t written in Russian, which Telegram Analytics says shouldn’t factor into a study of the impact of Russian censorship.

How could these statistics differ so dramatically?

Telegram doesn't publish traffic statistics, so the number of views on content posted by channels has to be counted manually. Telegram Analytics relies on volunteers to count the traffic to 40,000 Russian-language channels. Medialogia confirmed to Meduza that its analysis of 150,000 channels includes Russian-language channels “and open chats bots.”

These two monitoring projects also count differently: Medialogia only counts same-day views, while Telegram Analytics updates its figures on a channel's 100 most recent posts to account for readers who come late to new content. This is why Medialogia tracks so many more channels but records so many fewer views.

So which measure is better?

Both approaches count what they say they do, but Medialogia's system is more vulnerable to random fluctuations in traffic and the timing and quantity of posts on a particular day.

As Telegram Analytics has pointed out, there are also problems with Medialogia's decision to start its comparison with data from April 16, when Telegram traffic skyrocketed because of the start of Roskomnadzor's crackdown. What might seem like the devastating blow of Russian censorship could be the social network's audience and user activity returning to normal.