Month after blocking Telegram: what has changed?

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

This month a lot of interesting things happened. In particular, the blocking of thousands of IP addresses from different subranges has led to the failure of hundreds (and according to experts, thousands) of sites and services on the territory of the Russian Federation. But was it worth it? In other words, has Roskomnadzor achieved its goal of drastically reducing the popularity of the messenger among Russian citizens? Judging by the latest data, the effect of blocking, although it is, is very insignificant.

So, according to SimilarWeb, on May 14, Telegram was installed on approximately one fifth of Android devices operating 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.
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Users of gadgets with a mobile OS from Alphabet use Telegram quite actively, writes RBC. However, in April, about half of those users who installed it worked (meaning active users, not all who have a Telegram installed), then in May this figure was already 31.7%. In addition, the volume of downloads fell. In April it was 102 thousand downloads, now it is 40.5 thousand.

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

At the same time, the audience of Telegram channels does not decrease, but increases. 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 the Tgstat resource, the percentage of Telegram's active audience dropped by only 7 percentage points for the month. These data were obtained after analyzing the activity of three million subscribers of Russian-language channels (those who were online over the last week and after blocking). It seems to be a bit, but it may well be that the real figure is even lower. The change takes into account the natural decline of users, and if you make an amendment to this, comparing with foreign channels, where the decline is about 5% (their users are not susceptible to blocking), 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, an increase in the number of views. The May holidays could have had an impact on this figure - for example, on New Year holidays, the drop in views was about 28%. Yes, May is not as popular as the New Year, so 15% is quite likely a consequence of the craze for barbecues and resorts, when few people actively use Telegram.

The average number of posts per day fell by about 2%. This is an unimportant result that looks more like a statistical error.

As for advertisers' interest in the Telegram-channels, according to Combot, he, as far as can be judged, is growing. Lisa Aprilskaya, commercial director of Combot, says the following: “At the very beginning of the story with Telegram blocking, a number of large customers stopped posting - but quickly reconsidered their decision.

According to experts, the messenger has almost no users lost due to the presence of blocking bypass tools. “This is not just an obvious feeling - we, together with TGStat.ru, measured the coverage of posts with instructions on how to bypass a lock, the account count goes to thousands. Moreover, the creators of the proxy bots themselves write about the high prevalence of their decisions: only our @ socks5_bot bypasses blocking more than a million Russians, ”says Anton Protsenko, head of the content and analytics department at Combot.

At the same time, the losses of Russian companies due to the actions of Roskomnadzor amounted to about one billion US dollars. According to Medusa, about 117 million rubles are spent on the blocking data accounting system annually. Naturally, these funds provide taxpayers. Is it worth it? A rhetorical question.