How the Russian authorities tried to ban Telegram but only increased its’ popularity

So it what happens when the state decides to control the area in which it isn’t very knowledgeable. And how the blocking of Telegram in Russia led to a surge of popularity of the app. We’ll tell you this on our own example. ‘We’ — are the news сhannel Mash.

Telegram is a messenger, later there was added the possibility of creating channels. Channels are smth like groups in usual social networks, but there are no algorithmic news feed, comments, likes and etc. Only the author, his text, picture, video and the audience. You can subscribe to the channel. And then, you’ll receive notifications from the channels on your phone, like when you get a new message.

And soon channels in Telegram have become extremely popular in Russia. In a difficult time for the traditional media (crisis, lack of professionals, forbidden topics) channels have become a platform for independent and free access to information.

We made Mash in April 2017 and in a couple of months it had 100 thousand followers. It sounds like a little, but it was the most serious growth among all competitors. By the end of 2017 there were 200 thousand already and now we are striving to 300 thousand subscribers.

The consumption of information in messengers is different than in the usual media and social networks. Because of the notifications which you see on a main screen of the phone, the readability and speed of information distribution turned out to be much higher than before. If an article in a traditional media could has 50–60 thousand views in 3–4 hours, then in Mash such a number of subscribers looked through the information in the first minutes after its was posted.

Soon Roskomnadzor (media regulator)and Russian special services decided to block Telegram on the territory of the Russian Federation. They were worried about the lack of control of the messenger — Durov (Telegram founder) refused to provide encryption keys.

April 13 Tagansky Court of Moscow decided to block the app. From that moment, the amazing effect of the “closing door” began.

Usually about 800–1300 new users subscribe to our channel. On a wave of major news it could be up to 3–4 thousand. News is a short game, every day they have to be done anew and attract new followers. The effect of big news usually lasts 2 days — the event is a thing of the past, people stop looking for it and subscribe to your channel to find out the details.

April, 13 everything changed. In this day we had 5700 new followers. Next two days — (it was weekend, not a good time for news) 3000 more. The process of blocking began on Monday, April 16. On this day, in spite of the fact that the platform began to have difficulties with functioning, another 3000 people signed up for us, in the next hours — another 2,000. A similar situation was noted by all our competitors.

The same situation was with views . If on usual day there were 2.5 million views, so in new reality we had 3.5 and even more. The number of links in the media increased in many times.

We call this effect a “closing door”. Briefly — a man, fearing that there will not be more opportunity to follow, rushes to your channel at the last second. He is a very important person, he already set up a VPN or proxy for his work, he is ready to live in new conditions. He appreciates you for the fact he just was in time.

So, the state’s attempt to ban the work of the messenger in Russia led to the opposite effect: thousands and hundreds of thousands people went to the “gray” zone, installed applications to bypass the locks and subscribed to those channels that, according to the original idea, were to die.

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