Creators Are Moving Their Superfans to Telegram: 21 Creator Channels, 28 Million Members, and a Country Pulling the Plug

On December 19, 2025, Russia’s most-watched tech YouTuber got a question in to Vladimir Putin. Wylsacom, real name Valentin Petukhov, has 11.5 million YouTube subscribers. He did not ask about YouTube, which has been throttled in his country since the summer of 2024. He asked about Max, the state-backed messenger, and ended with a joke: “I wanted to ask you to subscribe to my Max channel about technology, but I understand you are already knowledgeable on this topic.”

The joke lands harder when you look at his numbers. His YouTube channel has added zero net subscribers in the last 90 days. His Telegram channel, Wylsacom Red, has 1,089,454 members and gets ten posts a day. His channel description on YouTube now lists a Max channel first, then two Telegram channels. He is a creator who has moved his audience once already, and who is being told, politely, that he will have to move it again.

That is the story of this piece. All over the world, creators are building a second home for their most loyal fans on Telegram: the students who need the exam notes, the viewers who want the unedited take, the football fans who want the transfer news before the tweet. We measured 21 of those channels, matched 11 of them to their owners’ YouTube channels in the CreatorDB index, and pulled a number YouTube will never show you: how many of a creator’s members actually open each post.

The 28 Million

We started from TGStat’s blogger rankings for the world, India, Iran and Uzbekistan, added the creators named in Bloomberg’s reporting on Russian influencers, and kept every channel we could read from Telegram’s public preview pages. That gave us 21 channels and 28,021,897 members. Eleven of the owners have YouTube channels in the CreatorDB index, so for those we can ask the real question: of the people who subscribed on YouTube, how many followed the creator into the channel?

The eleven cross-platform creators have 79.1 million YouTube subscribers between them and 7.65 million Telegram members. That is 9.7 percent overall and a median of 10 percent per creator. It sounds small until you remember what the 10 percent are: the people who took a deliberate step to be closer to one person.

Two shapes hide inside that chart. Sternenko, a Ukrainian activist and YouTuber (2.18 million subscribers), has pulled 41 percent of his YouTube audience into a channel that doubles as a fundraising desk for drones and posts sixteen times a day. Physics Wallah, the 14.3-million-subscriber teacher behind an ed-tech company that listed on the Indian stock exchanges in late 2025, has pulled 4 percent. One is a war-time news wire; the other is a notice board. They are both superfan channels, and they behave nothing alike.

Seventy Percent of Kuplinov’s Members Open Every Post

Telegram prints a view count on every channel post, in public, on the web. Divide the median views of a channel’s recent posts by its member count and you get something no video platform gives you for free: the share of the audience that actually shows up. We did that for the last eight to twenty public posts on each of the 21 channels.

The split is not about fame. It is about cadence. The eleven channels that post fewer than twice a day are opened by a median of 48 percent of their members. The ten that post more often drop to 18 percent per post. Kuplinov Play, a Russian-language gaming channel with 17.3 million subscribers and 7,708 videos, posts once every two days and 640,000 of his 915,000 members open it. BadComedian, a film critic whose YouTube channel has 201 videos in eleven years, posts every other day and his posts travel beyond the channel: 629,000 median views against 601,000 members.

The high-cadence channels are not failing; they are a different product. A creator posting ten or twenty times a day is running a wire service, and the right number for a wire is daily reach, not reach per item. Wylsacom’s 7 percent per post, ten times a day, still puts most of his million members in front of him every day. The per-post number matters when a brand pays for one post, which is the case we will come back to.

They Moved Once. Now the Exit Is Being Blocked.

By April 2026, Telegram was reachable without a VPN in Russia only about 5 percent of the time.

Fourteen of our 21 channels are Russian-language, and that is not an accident of sampling. Russia is where the superfan channel stopped being a nice-to-have and became the whole business. The sequence, with the measurements:

• March 2022Instagram is blocked. Its Russian audience falls from 52 million to 33 million by mid-2025, according to Bloomberg.
• Late July 2024YouTube playback is throttled nationwide. By April 2025 it has lost about 15 million Russian users.
• January 2025Mediascope counts 90.6 million monthly Telegram users in Russia against 86.9 million for YouTube. Telegram is ahead for the first time.
• August 29, 2025Bloomberg reports large Russian influencers charging up to $5,000 for a Telegram post, level with their old Instagram rates. The influencer market is forecast at 55.7 billion rubles for the year, up from 15 billion in 2021.
• August 2025Telegram voice calls are blocked. Regional restrictions follow in October.
• February 10, 2026Roskomnadzor announces intensified restrictions on Telegram for “non-compliance” with Russian law.
• April 2026Availability of Telegram without a VPN drops to about 5 percent, according to the Centre for Eastern Studies. Its Russian user base still counts more than 94 million; at least 40 percent of Russian internet users now run a VPN.
• August 19, 2026Max, the messenger VK launched in March 2025 and the Kremlin mandated by decree in June 2025, reports 11.5 million channels with 480 million subscriptions, 1 billion rubles of channel advertising in the first half of 2026, and a channel feature open to bloggers with 10,000 followers or more.

Look at what the YouTube side of our data says about the creators caught in that sequence. Kuplinov Play: 17.3 million subscribers, net growth over 90 days of zero. Wylsacom: 11.5 million, zero. Varlamov: 5.45 million, 0.7 percent. Yury Dud, who records from Spain: 10.3 million, 1 percent. These are not dying channels. They are channels whose home market can no longer watch them without a VPN, and whose owners kept the relationship alive somewhere else.

Maria Chervotkina, a Moscow creator quoted by Bloomberg, put the appeal of that somewhere else better than any dashboard: “On Telegram people don’t just subscribe to everyone, like to some shop or whatever, they really subscribe to you because they want to follow you. And the audience there is much more loyal, even if the numbers are smaller.” Karina Kasparyants, who once had two million Instagram followers, now has 1.3 million on YouTube, 173,000 on Telegram, and a fifth of them opening every post.

Which brings us back to Wylsacom’s joke. Max is not a rumor for these creators; it is where the state is asking them to move next, and Max’s own numbers show the ad money following. A creator who has already migrated a million people once knows exactly what that request costs. The lesson for everyone else is the part that travels: the channel you own is the only audience that moves with you.

Physics Wallah Posts Once Every Ten Days. Half of 534,000 Students Open It.

TGStat’s Indian blogger rankings are dominated by exam preparation: notes channels, top-ranked candidates sharing strategy, coaching institutes.

If Russia shows what a superfan channel does under pressure, India shows what it does at rest. Alakh Pandey started Physics Wallah as a YouTube physics class in 2016. It now has 14.3 million subscribers, the company behind it listed on the Indian stock exchanges in late 2025 at a 31 percent premium, and Pandey entered the Forbes billionaire list in March 2026. His official Telegram channel is the quietest in our set: 0.1 posts a day, one every ten days or so.

And 48 percent of its 534,000 members open each one. A median of 258,000 views on a post from a channel that hardly ever posts is what a notice board looks like when the notices matter: schedules, admissions, the test that decides a year. Nobody is scrolling for entertainment. They are waiting.

The counter-example sits in the same country. Acharya Prashant, a philosophy teacher with 6.72 million YouTube subscribers and the fastest-growing YouTube channel in our set (10 percent in 90 days), runs a Telegram channel of 16,357 members that posts twelve times a day and gets 435 views a post. It is not a superfan channel; it is a notification firehose, and the members treat it as one. Same platform, same size of creator, opposite result. Cadence and purpose decide it, not follower counts.

Twenty Posts a Day, Five Percent Each

Fabrizio Romano’s official channel: 406,561 members, twenty posts a day, and a median of 19,800 views per post.

Fabrizio Romano is the clearest case of the wire-service channel. His YouTube channel has 3.3 million subscribers and is still growing (6.5 percent in 90 days), his Telegram channel holds 12 percent of that number, and it posts twenty times a day. Each post is opened by about 5 percent of members. Nobody reads every “here we go”; they check the channel when their club is in the news. The value of the channel is that it is always on, and the per-post number is the price of being always on.

Sternenkoruns the same shape for very different stakes. The Ukrainian activist’s channel, 882,420 members and sixteen posts a day, carries front-line updates and fundraising for drones, and a quarter of the audience opens each post. Forty-one percent of his 2.18 million YouTube subscribers have joined it, the highest conversion of any creator we measured who still uploads to YouTube. When the content is urgent, the channel is not a second home. It is the first.

For scale, the platform’s own founder runs the biggest creator channel of all: Pavel Durov’s has 10,763,919 members, posts about once every four days, and draws a median of 4.3 million views, 40 percent of members. The Telegram-native mega-communities dwarf even that (Hamster Kombat’s announcement channel has 21.1 million members, Notcoin’s 8.7 million), but those are games and tokens, not people, and they belong to a different story.

Half the Ad Money, All the Stars, and $5,000 a Post

Telegram was a broadcast tool with no payout until 2024. Then it built three in eighteen months:

The revenue share is the one to watch and the one to be careful with. It pays on Telegram’s own ad platform, whose rates are low and whose availability differs by country, so for most of the creators in this piece the direct sponsorship is still the business and the revenue share is the bonus. What changed is that a creator with a million loyal members now has three ways to charge for them without asking a video platform’s permission.

Members Are Not Reach. Buy the Open Rate.

Everything above reduces to one rule for anyone paying for a Telegram post: the member count is the least useful number on the page. Two channels of a million members in our set reach 70 percent and 7 percent of them per post, a tenfold difference in what a sponsored post actually delivers. Cadence explains most of it, purpose explains the rest, and neither shows up in a media kit.

The good news is that Telegram publishes the views, so the open rate is checkable before you pay. We pulled the numbers in this piece by hand from public channel pages. For continuous tracking we use tgmetrics, a Telegram analytics index that records members, growth and views per post for more than 17,000 public communities, flags the ones whose member counts show signs of being bought, and ranks channels by the same views-per-member logic we used here. Pair that with the creator’s CreatorDB profile for the YouTube side and you have both halves of the relationship: how many people follow the creator, and how many of them would follow the creator anywhere.

The Only Audience That Moves With You

Every creator in this piece built their audience on a platform they do not control, and the Russian ones learned the hard way what that costs: a blocked Instagram, a throttled YouTube, and now a Telegram that works about 5 percent of the time without a VPN. What survived each move was not the subscriber count. It was the 10 percent who signed up to a channel because they wanted the person, not the feed.

That 10 percent is worth measuring properly. It is the audience that opens three posts in four when Kuplinov speaks, that waits ten days for Physics Wallah’s next notice, that funds drones from Sternenko’s sixteen posts a day. It is also the audience that Wylsacom, with 11.5 million YouTube subscribers he cannot grow and a million Telegram members he may soon have to lead somewhere else, was really talking about when he asked the president of Russia to subscribe.

Creators on Telegram, Answered

Do Big YouTubers Run Telegram Channels?

Yes, and the biggest are outside the English-speaking world. Kuplinov Play (17.3M YouTube subscribers) runs a 915,000-member channel, Wylsacom (11.5M) a 1.09M-member one, Yury Dud (10.3M) 865,000, and Physics Wallah (14.3M) 534,000. Fabrizio Romano’s official channel has 407,000 members.

What Share of a YouTuber’s Subscribers Join Their Telegram?

Across the 11 creators we could measure on both platforms, Telegram members equal 9.7 percent of YouTube subscribers in aggregate, with a median of 10 percent per creator. The range runs from 0.2 percent (Acharya Prashant) to 41 percent (Sternenko), and Evelone’s channel has more members than his dormant YouTube channel has subscribers.

What Is a Good Views-per-Member Rate on Telegram?

Across our 21 channels the median post is opened by 35 percent of members. Channels that post fewer than twice a day hit a median of 48 percent; channels posting more often than that drop to 18 percent per post. Two channels (Mellstroy, BadComedian) exceed 100 percent because Telegram counts forwards and public web views.

Why Are Russian Creators on Telegram?

Instagram was blocked in March 2022 and YouTube has been throttled since mid-2024, so Telegram became the main stage: Mediascope measured 90.6 million monthly Russian users in January 2025, ahead of YouTube’s 86.9 million for the first time. Since August 2025 the state has been restricting Telegram as well and steering creators to the VK-built messenger Max.

How Do Creators Make Money on Telegram?

Since March 2024 public channels with 1,000 or more subscribers receive 50 percent of the revenue from Telegram’s own ads. Telegram Stars (June 2024) added tips, paid posts and paid channel subscriptions. The bigger money is still direct sponsorships: large Russian creators charge up to $5,000 per Telegram post, according to Bloomberg.