How the Telegram Ads CPM auction works — and what Telegram does not publish

Telegram publishes exactly one number about how sponsored messages are priced, and it is not the one usually quoted. This page separates what the platform documents from what the market repeats — including what an earlier version of this page got wrong.

#What Telegram documents

Sponsored messages are billed per impression on a CPM basis, and there is one published floor:

> The minimum CPM for a sponsored message is 0.1 Toncoin.

— ads.telegram.org/getting-started, checked 28 July 2026. That sentence is the entirety of Telegram's published pricing floor.

#What Telegram does not document

Checked against Telegram's own pages on 28 July 2026, none of the following is published by Telegram anywhere:

• whether the auction is first-price or second-price
• what the winning bidder actually pays
• bid floors that vary by niche, geo or time of day
• a quality score, or any factor feeding into one
• how budget pacing behaves
• a minimum campaign budget, or a minimum deposit

Until July 2026 this page asserted all six as fact — a second-price auction, a "winner pays second-highest + €0.01" rule, a per-niche floor table from €0.3 to €2.0, and a quality score driven by CTR history. None of it came from Telegram. We removed it rather than keep it with a hedge, because a mechanism stated confidently is what people act on.

The CTR part deserves its own note: click data is not exposed to third parties at all, so nobody outside Telegram — including us — can observe CTR history feeding an auction.

#Where the widely-repeated numbers come from

These are third-party claims. They are worth knowing and worth attributing, but they are not platform documentation:

• **First-price, not second-price.** eLama describes the auction as first-price — the higher bid wins and pays its bid (as of 2026-05). That directly contradicts the second-price model this page used to assert.
• **Minimum CPM €1.5 in the EUR cabinet**, alongside the official 0.1 TON — fansgurus (as of 2026-03). Telegram itself publishes only the TON figure.
• **EUR cabinet via a reseller: deposit from €500** — aksanov.digital (as of 2026-04).
• **Direct cabinet without a reseller: €2M entry threshold** — adsgram (as of 2026-03). This is the number behind the "Telegram Ads is only for giants" belief; the reseller route is what makes the €500-scale entry possible.
• **Effective clearing CPM ~$5–15** for crypto and premium-geo TON placements, far above the 0.1 TON floor, because those slots are contested — PropellerAds (as of 2026-05).

Note how far apart the floor and the clearing price are. That gap is the actual answer to "what will I pay": the floor is a technical minimum, demand sets the rest.

#What we can say from our own archive

We index the sponsored creatives themselves. That means we can tell you, with dates, which formats, target countries, niches and CTA destinations recur, and how long a given creative stayed in rotation.

We cannot tell you CPM, CTR, clicks, conversions, spend or impressions. Telegram does not expose them to third parties, so those fields do not exist in our data — and any site that offers them as measurements owes you an explanation of where they came from.

#Reasoning about your served CPM without knowing the mechanism

You do not need the auction type to act on what the dashboard shows:

• **Served CPM equals your maximum bid.** Your bid was not contested in those rounds. Narrow targeting is the usual cause — a small eligible pool means few competing bids.
• **Served CPM is below your maximum.** There was competition and you were not the only bidder. Under a first-price model this means the platform cleared you lower; under second-price it means someone bid just under you. Both readings lead to the same action: you have room to test a lower bid.
• **Zero impressions on an approved, funded creative.** Your bid is below the clearing price for the audience you asked for. That is a demand statement, not necessarily a published floor — the only floor Telegram publishes is 0.1 TON.
• **Costs rise without a bid change.** More competition for the same audience, or a narrower eligible pool after a targeting edit. Compare against the same hours of the previous week, not against yesterday.

#See also

Pricing deep-dive across all three cabinets: /wiki/telegram-ads-pricing-guide. Step-by-step launch playbook: /wiki/how-to-launch-telegram-ads. Every sourced pricing fact we hold, each with its origin and date: /telegram-cpm.