Telegram allows online casinos to be advertised in Ukrainian TG channels. For this, it uses its sponsored message function. Channel owners have almost no influence on this. As a result, popular TG media have slots and calls to play at the end of the feed.
Telegram allows online casinos to be advertised in Ukrainian TG channels. For this, it uses its sponsored message function. Channel owners have almost no influence on this. As a result, popular TG media have slots and calls to play at the end of the feed.
As stated in the Telegram monetization program, since last year, owners of public channels with 1000+ subscribers have been able to have 50% of the revenue from advertising that Telegram places in sponsored messages.
In Ukraine, this opportunity is still unavailable. That is, it is impossible to earn money from this advertising. However, sponsored posts from Telegram are present. In fact, this is a separate advertising post that appears automatically at the end of the feed of popular channels.
Channel owners have no way of influencing its appearance. And for TG users themselves, there is only one way out: to take out a premium subscription, then sponsored messages will not be shown to them.
Recently, sponsored posts in TG have been favored by arbitrageurs who trade gambling traffic. They register their accounts in the Telegram advertising service and publish their posts in the most popular feeds of the Ukrainian TG segment. Of course, without the consent of the TG channel owners.
«Telegram Ads, an advertising network from Telega, from which you can safely bet even on gambling,» says a recommendation for arbitrageurs, which was published this year on one of the specialized websites.
Payment for advertising is made using TON, TG’s own cryptocurrency, which can be purchased both within Telegram and on exchanges.
The ad is first sent for moderation. And somehow posts about casinos go through this moderation. As noted in the article for arbitrators, there is a significant drawback in launching advertising through the account — the lack of targeting for Ukraine, Germany, Israel, Palestine and the Russian Federation. However, this limitation can be easily circumvented if you launch advertising using Stars — Telegram’s internal currency. For some reason, country restrictions do not apply in this case.
We monitored Ukrainian Telegram channels and found gambling ads from Telegram on many of them. These are quite large channels with several tens of thousands of subscribers.
We spoke with their owners, who are outraged by the fact that Telegram is actually pushing them into danger. According to the norms of Ukrainian legislation, casino advertising in Ukraine is prohibited (with some exceptions). And for violating these norms, online media or a Telegram channel can be fined 4.8 million UAH. Recently, the owner of the Trukha channel received such a fine.
«We know that they (Telegram — Ed.) advertise casinos and gambling, this is the default advertising from TG, we don’t put it, and we didn’t want to see it. It’s not only here, it’s almost everywhere in TG,» the channel admin, Financial Manager, commented on the situation to us.
«The only option to prevent Telegram from running its advertising on our channel, which, by the way, we, as admins, do not see, is to delete the channel. You and I cannot influence Telegram’s policy,» adds the admin of the Money in the Bank channel.
We found out that Telegram has an authorized advertising reseller in Ukraine. This is the company Netpeak. We asked this company for a comment.
Here it is: «Yes, Telegram allowed the promotion of gambling, but Netpeak does not open offices for this direction. Regarding Stars and channel monetization: yes, Ukrainian channels can run their own advertising through Stars, and Ukrainian channels can be targeted.»
But, according to Netpeak, the channels cannot receive advertising revenue, this function is not available in the exclusion countries, as is the display of advertising if you pay TON for it.
In fact, Netpeak confirmed that Telegram has indeed opened up a simple way in Ukraine to promote gambling in large TG channels.
Is there anyway to prevent TG ads from appearing on your channel?
Netpeak replied that there are several methods:
We reached out to the State Agency for Control of Gambling and Lottery Business PlayCity for comment. «We are aware of the problem and are looking for a solution,» Gennady Novikov, the head of the agency, told dev.ua. He emphasized that the channel owner is not responsible for this advertising.
Illegal gambling advertising in Ukraine is a significant problem that has yet to be solved. It appears not only on gray sites, but also on the official service of the international Telegram platform, whose channels are one of the main sources of information for Ukrainians. In popular channels, they see images of slots and calls to play. Can anything be done about it?
