Six checks on a channel before you pay for it

A channel's media kit shows the best week of the past six months. That's not fraud — it's sales. An audience audit exists precisely to see the other twenty-five weeks.

Subscriber growth dynamics

The growth chart should look like a slope, not a staircase. A sharp step of twenty thousand in a day means purchased followers or cross-promotion with a major channel. The first is dead audience; the second is audience that came for something else and stayed by accident.

The opposite should also raise a flag: a channel that hasn't grown at all in six months. Either the creator stopped investing, or the audience burned out and is leaving at the same rate it arrives.

Reach-to-subscriber ratio, by median

Take the last thirty posts and calculate the median views, not the average and not the top result. The average gets inflated by one viral post; the top one is pinned precisely because it's the top one.

A healthy ratio depends on the platform: on Telegram it's 25–60% of subscribers, with larger channels closer to the lower end. Below 15% means either a dead base or the algorithm stopped showing the channel to its own readers.

View curve shape

A live post accumulates views over a day and continues picking them up over the week. A boosted post gets almost all of them within an hour and flatlines. This difference is visible to the naked eye and is more expensive to fake than the views themselves — so almost nobody fakes it.

Advertising history

We look at who advertised in the past three months. Three competitors in a row means the audience has already been offered the same thing, and your offer will be the fourth. Five placements per week means the channel lives off ads and readers scroll past them.

We separately look for direct competitors. Not to walk away, but to understand: if your product goes live a week after theirs, people will compare you to them, and you need to speak in the language of differences.

Comments

We read the discussions under recent posts. Thoughtful replies, debate, questions to the creator — that's a live audience. Identical emoji and one-word praise under every post — the comments were bought along with the views.

A complete absence of comments isn't a death sentence: some channels have them turned off. But then there's no way to verify the audience, and such a channel goes into testing last.

Test placement

Every new channel in our database gets one trial post at our expense. It's more expensive than trusting the media kit and cheaper than losing client budget on it. Based on the result, the channel enters the database tagged with actual reach — ours, not the seller's.

What this achieves

The dropout rate at this stage is roughly two-thirds. Sounds wasteful until you do the math the other way: a channel with inflated views costs the same as a real one and delivers zero. One such buy in a twenty-placement flight eats five percent of the budget and distorts the average cost per action enough to make the entire flight look like a failure.