In March 2022, the Russian authorities banned Instagram, as part of broader restrictions on freedom of expression. Photo / Getty Images
Karina Kasparyants began her career as an influencer in her teens, making YouTube videos of beauty tips, shopping hauls and glimpses into her everyday life as a student in Moscow in the mid-2010s.
Soon, she started to post on Instagram too, gradually building up a following of more than two million people.
At the time, major foreign brands were spending heavily in the Russian market, and Kasparyants was able to build lucrative relationships with companies, including Samsung Electronics Co. and Hennes & Mauritz AB.
“Back then, I wanted to pour all of my energy into Instagram because that’s where the biggest brands were spending their advertising budgets and inviting influencers on press tours,” she said.
By 2021, the size of the influencer marketing business in Russia had reached 15 billion roubles ($317 million), according to data from digital influencer marketing platform Perfluence.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 threatened to disrupt that.
Many Western brands pulled out of the Russian market. Some United States-owned social media companies changed their policies to limit Russian users’ ability to receive payments.
In March 2022, the Russian authorities banned Instagram, as part of broader restrictions on freedom of expression.
Influencers’ earnings on Western platforms plummeted, so they had to adapt. Kasparyants, like many others, followed a large part of her audience to Telegram, the private messaging service, establishing a parallel channel where she could make up her lost revenues.
Over the past three years, Telegram has helped to underpin an influencer economy that has defied sanctions and censorship to continue growing.
That success could be fragile, however. The Russian Government has embarked on a new crackdown on foreign platforms, pushing users towards more pliable home-grown services.
“There is always a risk Telegram could be blocked,” Sergei Lyashenko, chief executive of Beseed, a Moscow-based social media advertising platform, said.
“The only constant in this market is adaptation, every six months, sometimes every month, you have to review your toolkit and adjust to what’s still legal and available.”
Telegram was launched in 2013 by the Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who had previously founded the social media platform VKontakte in St Petersburg.
The Durovs left VKontakte - since renamed VK - in 2014, claiming that it had been effectively taken over by the state. VK is now run by Vladimir Kirienko, the son of one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aides.
Based in Dubai, Telegram has often been criticised for hosting child sexual abuse material, terrorist content, and other criminal groups. Pavel Durov was indicted in France last August on charges including complicity in distributing child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking. Durov denies the charges.
The Russian Government tried to block Telegram in 2018, after the platform refused to provide the security services access to user data, but the restrictions largely failed due to the technical complexity of blocking the service and were lifted in 2020.
Since 2021, Telegram’s monthly active users in Russia have risen by 60% to 120 million - more than 90% of the country’s internet users - according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.
The Russian Government’s attempts to block and restrict foreign platforms hasn’t been a total success. Virtual private networks, which can disguise a user’s location and access banned services, are regularly the most popular apps in Russian stores, despite the authorities’ attempts to crack down on their use.
But even so, Instagram’s monthly active users in Russia have dropped from 52 million users in 2021 to 33 million by mid-2025, according to Sensor Tower.
Over the past year, YouTube has lost nearly 40% of its monthly active users in Russia, according to Russian media-monitoring agency Mediascope.
VK, which has its own video platform, recently overtook YouTube in monthly active users, Mediascope data shows.
But it is Telegram that has benefitted most, filling the gaps left by other platforms. Independent media and bloggers have moved to the platform to skirt blocks on their websites and other social media services, while state media and propagandists now use it extensively.
According to TG Stat, a Telegram monitoring service, since May 2022, the app’s grown in all channel categories in Russia, including blogs, news and media, politics and education, turning into an all-in-one media space with nearly 1.4 million channels.
“Telegram today is used like a publishing and distribution platform: public channels act as micro-blogs, links to livestreams and podcasts are shared,” Payal Arora, a digital anthropologist and professor of AI cultures at the University of Utrecht, said.
“Telegram channels function like hyper-local newsrooms, hobby clubs, and streaming libraries rolled into one.”
Kasparyants started developing her Telegram channel more actively in 2022, as well as building her presence on VK and RuTube, a state-controlled YouTube alternative. She’s now reached a stage, she said, where her accounts on Telegram and Russian platforms have covered the lost revenue from YouTube and Instagram.
Unlike traditional social platforms such as Instagram, Telegram’s interface resembles a messenger like WhatsApp. Its channels were originally used for long-form text, which made it difficult for influencers to directly replicate their feeds on the new platform.
Over time, they’ve adapted to use the tools that are available, using a mix of formats - short circles, a feature like Instagram stories for daily updates, podcast-like voice notes for longer reflections and a blend of images and text for brand collaborations.
“On Telegram people don’t just subscribe to everyone, like to some shop or whatever, they really subscribe to you because they want to follow you,” Maria Chervotkina, a Moscow-based influencer, said. “And the audience there is much more loyal, even if the numbers are smaller.”
Critically, Telegram also offers Russians a way to make money.
Since the full-scale invasion, Russia has been mostly cut off from mainstream payment systems. Telegram, unlike Western platforms, allows users to make and take payments using YooMoney, a transaction service owned by Sberbank, which is compatible with Mir cards, Russia’s alternative to Visa or Mastercard.
Local companies have followed audiences onto Telegram.
“For brands in Russia, targeted ads on Meta platforms were their bread and butter,” Anastasia Timofeichuk, an influencer marketing expert, said. With those ads no longer accessible on Instagram and Facebook, brands started relying more on alternative platforms to reach their audiences.
Between 2022 and 2024, the average cost of advertising on the app nearly doubled, according to the advertising marketplace BeSeed. A micro-influencer, a content creator with 10,000-15,000 followers, can make between US$300-US$1000 for a single advert. Larger influencers can earn up to US$5000 for a post, the same as they would from an Instagram advertisement.
Today, influencers’ Telegram channels still advertise western goods.
On a ski trip to the resort town of Sochi late last year, Kasparyants promoted mascara made by the French cosmetics company Clarins, and lip liner from Italy’s Pupa, directing her followers to Ozon, Russia’s largest digital marketplace.
Many of these foreign products reach Russia via third countries, such as Turkey, the UAE or Kazakhstan, despite the heavy sanctions on the Russian economy. But Russian brands are increasingly driving influencers’ revenues.
The overall influencer marketing business in Russia grew by more than a third in 2024, according to Russia’s Association of Bloggers and Agencies, and is forecast to reach 55.7 billion roubles in 2025.
Over the past few months, Russia has announced new crackdowns on foreign social media. Another new law, passed in the state legislature in April, means that Russian companies will be banned from advertising on Instagram from September 1. “Instagram’s share will drop to zero for those who operate within the law,” Lyashenko said.
Telegram could be next. Last month, the Russian authorities banned voice calls on the app, along with WhatsApp, alleging that they were being exploited for criminal purposes.
In March, VK launched a Russian government-approved app called Max, which mimics many of Telegram’s functions. By law, it will be pre-installed on all tablets and phones sold in Russia from September 1.
Sergey Boyarskiy, the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, warned in June that as Max gets fully rolled out, Telegram should anticipate harsher sanctions.
“We see synchronisation: the Instagram ad ban starting September 1 and the push for VK Max are happening in parallel,” Beseed’s Lyashenko said.
“It creates a vacuum that Russian platforms are expected to fill.”
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