Telegram Channel Scraper

Telegram Channel Scraper: posts, views and media flags from any public channel

Name a public Telegram channel and get its posts back as rows: the message text, the exact timestamp, the view count, whether media is attached and which kind, plus a direct link to the post. It pages backwards through the history until it has the number you asked for.

Public channels only, the ones with a web preview page. Private channels, invite links and groups have no public page to read, so none of them work here.

📣 What Telegram Channel Scraper does

It reads a channel's public preview page and walks back through it, roughly 16 to 20 messages at a time, until it hits your limit or reaches the first message ever posted. Posts are deduped by message id inside a run.

Each post row carries the channel title and subscriber count alongside the message, so a multi channel run stays sortable without joining anything. With the summary row switched on you also get one row per channel with the description and the photo, video and link totals.

A channel that is private, deleted or has no public preview reports itself and does not stop the others.

📥 What you give it

{
  "channels": ["telegram", "@durov", "https://t.me/durov"],
  "maxItems": 100,
  "includeChannelInfoRow": true
}

Invite links do not work. A t.me/+abc123 or t.me/joinchat/abc123 link points at a private channel, and those have no public page. Use the public t.me/<name> form.

📤 What you get back

A real post row from a recent run, with the message text cut short and its emoji removed:

{
  "ok": true,
  "rowType": "post",
  "channel": "telegram",
  "messageId": 460,
  "postUrl": "https://t.me/telegram/460",
  "text": "For all the info from today's update and a look back at 13 years of Telegram features ... check out our blog:\nhttps://telegram.org/blog/welcome-messages-buttons-TG-13",
  "date": "2026-08-26T19:12:34.000Z",
  "views": "1.15M",
  "author": "Telegram News",
  "hasMedia": false,
  "mediaType": null,
  "mediaUrl": null,
  "link": "https://telegram.org/blog/welcome-messages-buttons-TG-13",
  "channelTitle": "Telegram News",
  "subscribers": "9.56M"
}

The summary row uses rowType: "channel" and carries channelTitle, channelUsername, channelDescription, subscribers, photosCount, videosCount, linksCount and postsReturned.

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can land in your dataset.

Filter on rowType. The summary row shares the dataset with posts and renders mostly blank in the default table view, which is what a "why is there an empty line" question usually turns out to be.

One bad channel never stops the others, and a diagnostic row never fails the run.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Telegram Channel Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put one channel per line into Channels. A username like durov is enough. 3. Set Max posts per channel. Start around 20 to see the output shape. 4. Leave Emit a channel info row on if you want the subscriber and media totals, then click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$1.50 per 1,000 posts, which is $0.0015 each. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

Posts are what you pay for. Channel summary rows and diagnostic rows are free, duplicates within a run are dropped before they reach you, and a channel that turns out to be private or empty costs you nothing.

💡 What people use it for

• Archiving a channel's history once, then topping it up weekly with messageId as the dedupe key.
• Watching announcement channels for a product or a token and pulling the text into an alert.
• Measuring which posts in a channel actually travelled, using the view counts next to the dates.
• Collecting the outbound links a channel shares, which sit in link ready to follow.

🚧 What it does not do

• Public channels only. No private channels, no invite links, no groups, no direct messages.
• No reactions and no comments. The preview page does not publish them, so there is nothing to

read.

• views and subscribers are strings. 1.15M is what Telegram prints and what you get.
• mediaUrl is a thumbnail. Full-size photos, videos and documents are not downloaded.
• No forwarding chain. You get the post as the channel shows it, not where it was forwarded from.
• No search. You name channels, not keywords. Filter the rows afterwards.
• A very old channel takes many pages. Pulling thousands of posts means many requests, so give a

large run enough time.

• Media-only posts have no text, which shows as null rather than an empty string.

🧭 Which messaging or social scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a bot token or an API key? No. Nothing to register and nothing to log in to.

Can I read a private channel I am a member of? No. This reads the public preview page, and a private channel has none.

Why are views a string like 1.15M? Because that is exactly what Telegram publishes on the page. Rounding it there is their decision, not something the actor can undo.

How far back can it go? To the first message, if you raise maxItems enough. It stops early when the channel runs out.

Can I schedule it? Yes. A daily run with a small maxItems keeps a channel current, and messageId makes deduping straightforward.

Is scraping Telegram channels legal? These are public channels with public web pages. Posts can still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the exact channel entry you used. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually names the problem on its own.