Telegram channel stories force owners to beg for votes

Market participants surveyed by Kommersant, who were counting on the launch of the ability to publish stories on Telegram on behalf of channels, did not receive what they expected. The mechanics implemented by the platform force channel administrators to ask audience members for their votes, the so-called boost. The latter are issued only to premium users and one per day. As a result, according to experts, only large channels with a loyal audience will be able to benefit from the tool, which, in the course of competition, will have to come up with game mechanics, such as competitions.

“Kommersant” discussed with participants in the advertising and blogger markets the prospects of using stories – disappearing messages at the top of the application – in Telegram channels.

The ability to publish stories on behalf of the channel appeared on September 22, but it is implemented differently than in most social networks. To publish stories, the channel administrator must constantly attract a certain number of “boosts” (from the English boost – “promote”) from other Telegram users (depending on the number of his subscribers). “Boosts” are received only by those users who pay for a Telegram Premium subscription, and each person is given only one per day.

The Telegram stories format appeared in July only for private users and their audience from their contact list. For commercial purposes, such stories were used mainly by individual entrepreneurs and small businesses in the service sector, for example, beauty salons, whose contacts are listed in customer phone books (see Kommersant, July 27).

After the September expansion of stories on Telegram, many popular channels began asking subscribers to “vote” to include stories for them by giving their “boosts.” On September 24, stories appeared, for example, at X5 Club, Yandex Market, Vizit.

Stories for Telegram channels in their current form “are not what the market was waiting for, subscribers will get tired of giving boosts, and they will not do it all the time,” believes Digital Church founder Mark Khludnev. The expert is confident that sooner or later the service will launch “the usual functionality that is expected of it,” and a system of a limited number of “boosts” has been introduced to maintain an acceptable load on the Telegram servers.

SA Media executive director Nikita Pribylovsky called the implementation “non-standard and unexpected,” but noted that it can motivate channels to develop.

In the form in which the function is implemented, it will be more useful for channels with a large audience, says Ekaterina Movsesyan, General Director of KROS JSC. However, the total number of subscribers, according to her, is only an indirect indicator: “Well-known communities, especially from large cities and regions, have more premium readers. The level of salaries in small localities does not always allow purchasing a monthly subscription, which does not greatly affect the functionality of the application.”

Stories in Telegram will allow you to show content to those channel subscribers who have turned off notifications about their messages, says Igor Solomatin, Marketing Director of PIK Group. The service, according to him, needed to make stories “an interesting inventory for promoting channels” and at the same time not overload them with advertising: “In essence, channels with a loyal audience will be able to publish stories, while others will not.”

Mr. Solomatin predicts that in the near future administrators of Telegram channels will develop game mechanics through which they will receive “boosts.” These could be calls in a comic form or promises to hold a competition after the channel gets the required number of “boosts,” adds Messrs. Movsesyan.

Thematic channels can remind subscribers about boosts once a day in the morning or evening, and broadcast channels “maybe two or three times a day,” says Vasily Cherny, director of strategic communications at Brand Analytics. According to him, the mechanics of “boosts” will “partly make administrators beggars,” but this is also typical for other platforms: “From YouTube, we see that authors do not forget to remind people about subscriptions and likes. But each author has developed his own “appeal” format and tries not to overdo it with such communication.”

Yuri Litvinenko