Telegram audience in Russia grew to 6 million people

The audience of the Telegram messenger in the Russian Federation has grown to 6 million people, according to analysts from the Telegram Combot group chat service analysts. There is also a significant growth rate in the number of users: over the past year, the audience has tripled.

The data provided by Combot, for Vedomosti, was confirmed by two of the three Big Three operators. According to them, the figure voiced by experts corresponds to the statistics of the operators themselves.

Estimated by the Director General of Combot Fyodor Skuratov, monthly Telegram is used by about 60% of all users who installed the application. The share of the Russian Federation accounts for 6% of the global number of messenger users.

Telegram enjoys the greatest popularity in Iran. There the audience of the messenger is about 35-40 million users. This is due to tight government policies and censorship. Telegram provides encryption services that help people from the Islamic Republic to avoid the attention of the authorities and the morality police.
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In addition to the Telegram for correspondence, the Iranian youth uses the Gershad application for the domestic market (an abbreviation of the phrase “Gashte Ershad”, which can be translated as a “guide on patrols”), which was written about by Geektimes about a year ago.

The figure of 100 million users worldwide, which was brought by the founder of Telegram Pavel Durov, looks more than real in the light of Combot data.

According to representatives of mobile operators, Telegram loses in terms of the size of the audience to its main competitors in the Russian market of instant messengers - the Whats App, Skype and Viber. In addition, the leading position in the market of mobile applications in the Russian Federation is occupied by the social network VKontakte. The three above mentioned messengers and the social network application form the top-4 by the number of downloads on the territory of the Russian Federation, while Telegram for iOS is only 20, and for Android, in 39th place.

Representatives of the Viber and the Whats App cite as the proof of their leadership in the market the number of downloads in Russia and around the world, but they do not disclose the exact number or percentage of active users. The same policy is followed by Microsoft with its Skype product.