Telegram Premium giveaway in a channel

How to run a Premium giveaway in a channel

1. Open your channel's statistics and go to the Boosts section. Telegram's blog describes it as Channel Settings → Statistics → Boosts for a channel and Group Info → Statistics → Boosts for a group.
2. Choose the prize: Telegram Premium subscriptions or Stars. You can add a prize of your own, such as a physical item, described in words.
3. Set the conditions: the channel or channels a person must be subscribed to, only new subscribers, the countries whose users may take part, and the end date.
4. Decide whether to show the winners in the channel. If you do, Telegram publishes the list in a results message.
5. Pay for the prizes in advance — the organizer pays for the subscriptions or Stars before the giveaway starts.

A message about the giveaway appears in the channel, and from there Telegram does the work: it picks the winners at random under the rules you set. According to Telegram's developer documentation, a channel or supergroup administrator with any set of rights may launch a giveaway.

What a giveaway gives the channel

Every Premium subscription given away brings the channel 4 boosts. Per Telegram's documentation, these boosts cannot be moved to another channel while the gifted subscription lasts. More: Telegram boosts.

How to take part in a giveaway

• Be subscribed to the channel running the giveaway, and to any extra channels the organizer listed.
• Check the conditions. With "only new subscribers", anyone who joined the channel before the giveaway started cannot take part. If countries are set, the country of your phone number counts. Administrators of the organizing channels cannot take part.
• Entering costs nothing: the organizer pays for the prizes.

How to tell that you won

• Premium. Telegram itself sends the winner a service message with a gift link. Open it in Telegram and activate the subscription — until you do, Premium does not switch on.
• Stars. If Stars were the prize, Telegram credits them to the winner. You can spend them on paid media and channel subscriptions, in games and in mini apps.
• The list of winners. If the organizer chose to show winners, the results are published in the channel as a message.
• Your status. Telegram keeps it for every giveaway: whether you are taking part, whether the results are being prepared, whether you won, and whether the giveaway was canceled. If you cannot take part, it names the reason: you joined the channel before the start under "only new subscribers", your phone number is from an excluded country, or you are an administrator of an organizing channel.

If a prize from a giveaway did not switch on, see Telegram Premium not working or disappeared.

Fake Premium giveaways

A real prize is handed out by Telegram in a service message, and the organizer needs neither your login code nor your cloud password nor a payment for it. A bot that writes "you won Premium" and asks you to sign in with Telegram, type a code from a message or pay for "delivery" is a trap: with your login code a scammer gets into your account. More schemes: scams in Telegram.

A Stars giveaway through the Shiba Bank bot

For a giveaway with a public check of the result, the bot has "🎉 Giveaways": it posts in your channel with a "Join" button, sifts out extra accounts, fixes the list of entrants before the draw and picks the winners with a public random number that anyone can recount. The prizes are Stars from your wallet in the bot, and the winners receive them in their own wallet. Stars can go toward Premium: in the bot it can be paid with Stars from the wallet. Step by step: a Stars giveaway in a channel and how to run a giveaway in a Telegram channel.

Running a Premium giveaway by hand? Set up the subscription for the winner by @username in the bot — for 3, 6 or 12 months, paying in crypto or with Stars from the wallet.

Frequently asked questions