Telegram blocking did not affect the size of the messenger's Russian audience

The efforts of Roskomnadzor to block Telegram, which has been going on for 2.5 months, have had virtually no effect on the size of the Russian audience of the messenger. Vedomosti writes about this with reference to data from the analytical company Mediascope.

According to analysts' findings, in May of this year, the Telegram mobile application was used on average by 3.67 million people living in cities with a population of over 100 thousand people. Moreover, in April this figure amounted to 3.71 million people, setting a record and increasing by 70% compared to October last year, when Mediascope began assessing Telegram’s audience.

Let us recall that the Tagansky Court of Moscow decided to block the Telegram messenger on the territory of the Russian Federation due to its refusal to hand over encryption keys to the FSB on April 13. On April 16, Roskomnadzor sent information to telecom operators about restricting access to Telegram, and within a few days, millions of IP addresses from Amazon, Google and other companies were blocked, which led to disruptions in the operation of a number of sites and services and did not greatly affect the performance of Telegram . Later, a significant portion of the IP addresses were unblocked.

On May 16, representatives of the Combot, TGStat and Crosser Bot services summed up the results of the first month of blocking the Telegram messenger and came to the conclusion that Roskomnadzor’s efforts to limit access to Telegram had a slight impact on its user traffic. Thus, according to company analysis, after the blocking began, the share of the active Telegram audience in Russia decreased by seven percentage points - from 82% to 75%.

On May 24, the head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, said that during the blocking of the messenger, its audience decreased by a quarter, and currently Telegram works intermittently for 15-40% of users per day. The next day, Zharov announced that the department intended to achieve a complete blocking of Telegram.