How to Advertise on Telegram in 2026: Complete Guide to Telegram Ads

Telegram has more than 1 billion monthly active users (Pavel Durov, March 2025), and its own ad system, Telegram Ads, shows short sponsored messages in public channels, bots, search and the video player. This guide walks through a first campaign step by step, as of September 2026.

---

Step 1. Choose a cabinet#

Telegram Ads is sold through three different cabinets. They differ in who can open them, how you pay and how precisely you can target:

	Euro cabinet	Gram cabinet	Stars cabinet
Access	Through a reseller or agency	Self-serve at ads.telegram.org	Owners of a channel or bot
Payment	Euro invoice from the reseller	Gram, topped up via Fragment	Stars from your balance
Targeting	Country, city, language, interests, channels, bots, search, retargeting	Explicit lists of channels, bots and search keywords	Promotes only your own channel or bot
Entry, per practitioners and resellers	€250–500 first top-up; commission 15–20%	About 20 Gram	About 1,000 Stars

Sources: aksanov.digital, eLama, Click.ru, Telegram API: Stars.

• Euro cabinet — the choice for brands that need a country, city or language. eLama says a direct contract with Telegram needs a budget from €2 million, so almost everyone buys through resellers. More in our euro cabinet guide and agency guide.
• Gram cabinet — for advertisers who already hold crypto and know exactly which channels they want. Gram is the new name of Toncoin since 15 June 2026 (@gram, more). One practitioner reports that Gram-cabinet ads are not shown to users from Russia (aksanov.digital).
• Stars cabinet — a channel or bot can spend its Stars on promoting itself; one Star is worth $0.02 of ad credit, against $0.013 on withdrawal (Content Creator Rewards). More in the Stars cabinet guide.

Step 2. Prepare the destination#

Telegram reviews not only the ad but also where it leads (ad policies, section 4):

• a channel, bot or account needs an avatar and a filled-in description;
• a channel must have published a post in the two weeks before review — empty channels, bots and accounts are rejected;
• bots must respond on mobile and desktop; websites must load without errors, placeholders, paywalls or forced login, and be available in the countries you target;
• the destination must match the ad text, with no redirects or cloaking;
• the language of the target channels should match the language of the ad and of the destination.

Step 3. Write an ad that passes review#

A sponsored message is text of up to 160 characters including spaces plus one button (ad policies, section 1). The policies also require:

• plain editing — no caps lock, spaced-out letters, ASCII art, intrusive emoji, line breaks, bullet points or numbering;
• links — the main link goes in the URL field, plus at most one link in the text in the form @link or t.me/link, leading to the same place; no link shorteners or IP addresses;
• no deception — no clickbait, superlatives, comparisons with competitors, focus on personal characteristics or tragedies.

What is banned in every cabinet (section 5): shocking and adult content, including dating services; hate; political and religious ads; gambling, including betting, lotteries, bingo, fantasy sports and predictions; harmful financial services such as payday loans, pyramid schemes, MLM or guaranteed income; uncertified medicine and supplements; drugs, alcohol and tobacco; weapons; spam and malware, including fake followers; and anything of dubious legality.

Images and video. Media formats were opened to agencies in September 2024 (tginfo); resellers sell them with a markup of about +80% for an image and +100% for a video (eLama). According to the Telegram Ads API documentation (September 2026), an image is JPEG or PNG up to 5 MB and a video is MP4 up to 20 MB, 3–60 seconds, 16:9.

Step 4. Choose placements and targeting#

Telegram's client API describes four places for sponsored content: channels, bots, search and the video player (Telegram API).

• Channels — the classic placement, under or between posts.
• Search (since April 2025) — a channel or bot above global search results for up to 10 keywords of 4–32 characters; websites cannot be promoted there (ppc.world). Search ads bought with TON were not shown in Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine (tginfo).
• Bots (since May 2025, per the reseller OneSpot) — bots with 1,000+ daily users, CPM from €1 (tginfo).
• Video player (since July 2025) — a text ad over full-screen channel videos, sold only through agencies (tginfo).
• Banner in Bot (September 2026, per MTS AdTech) — ads inside bots for a chosen audience (AdIndex).

All placements with dates are in our ad surfaces overview.

Step 5. Set the price and budget#

You pay per thousand impressions (CPM) in an auction.

• Minimum CPM in the self-serve cabinet is 0.1 (the page still says "0.1 Toncoin", i.e. Gram) (getting started).
• Russia has separate floors, per eLama since 28 August 2026: €0.60 for country or language targeting, €0.30 for politics, €0.75 for channels, bots and search (eLama).
• Real prices are higher than the floors. In January 2026 eLama's clients paid on average from €3.0 (blogs, games) to €10.0 (marketing, PR) (eLama). The agency SA Media saw CPM fall from €1.64 in January to €0.97 in August 2026 (ppc.world); the platform Magnetto reports €1.04 in April and €0.98 in June, with CTR rising from 0.67% to 0.86% (Kod).

These figures describe different advertisers, markets and cabinets, so treat them as ranges, not as a price list.

Step 6. Pay#

• Euro cabinet: the reseller invoices you in euros and funds the cabinet.
• Gram cabinet: in the cabinet choose Budget → Add Funds; it sends you to fragment.com/ads/topup. There you connect a TON wallet such as Tonkeeper or MyTonWallet holding Gram bought on an exchange, and confirm the payment. Step-by-step instructions are on tgads.net.
• Stars cabinet: Stars are debited from the balance of your channel or bot.

Step 7. Measure the result#

Add UTM tags to website links so your analytics can attribute visits. According to the Telegram Ads API documentation, the cabinet also supports a pixel and conversion events. To see what competitors are running, use a public ad archive such as the Telegram Ads Spy feed.

---

If you advertise to users in Russia#

Since 1 September 2025 Russian law bans ads on resources with restricted access, and the antimonopoly service said it applies to Telegram; it also said it would not penalise ads in Telegram until the end of 2026 (Pravo.ru). Ads must be labelled and carry an erid token. Details: Russia's ban and moratorium.

What our archive shows#

On 23 September 2026 the public Telegram Ads Spy API listed 585,770 ad creatives. 67.7% led to channels, 20.6% to bots, 7.5% to personal accounts and 4.2% to websites; 80.4% of creatives are marked as bought through the Gram rail and 19.6% through euro cabinets (public API). These are shares of creatives we recorded, not shares of money spent.

---

FAQ#

How much does Telegram advertising cost? The floor is 0.1 Gram per 1,000 impressions in the self-serve cabinet; resellers report average CPMs of about €1–10 depending on topic and market.

What is the minimum budget? Resellers start from €250–500; the Gram cabinet from about 20 Gram, per practitioners. Telegram itself publishes only the minimum CPM.

Can I advertise a website? Yes, in the euro cabinet. Telegram's policies allow channels, bots, accounts and websites, but search ads promote only channels and bots.

Can I target a country in the Gram cabinet? No. The Gram cabinet places ads by explicit lists of channels, bots and keywords; country and language targeting are euro-cabinet features.

Are gambling ads allowed? No. Gambling, including betting, lotteries and predictions, is banned in every cabinet (section 5.6 of the ad policies).

---

Related guides#

• Euro cabinet guide
• Stars cabinet guide
• Where Telegram ads appear
• Toncoin is now Gram
• Suggested Posts
• Telegram Ads agencies

Sources: Telegram Ads, ad policies, getting started, Telegram API, Content Creator Rewards, Fragment, Pavel Durov, @gram, tginfo, eLama, Click.ru, aksanov.digital, ppc.world, Kod, AdIndex, Pravo.ru. Checked on 24 September 2026.

telemetr.com Research (2026). How to Advertise on Telegram in 2026: Complete Guide to Telegram Ads. telemetr.com. Retrieved from: https://telemetr.com/blog/how-to-advertise-on-telegram-2026