Telegram now has fair giveaways in its channels.

The platform itself will be responsible for selecting the winners, not channel administrators or bots.

Telegram has announced a new option for channel owners: a tool for holding prize draws for subscribers. The announcement notes that although sweepstakes have long been held on various social networks, until now there has been no way to guarantee the fairness of the results. In the case of the messenger, Telegram itself acts as the guarantor of fairness in choosing the winners.

When launching a drawing, the organizer can select the number of winners, the timing of the drawing and additional settings: for example, allowing only new subscribers or residents of certain countries to participate. You can also specify additional channels to which you need to subscribe to participate in the drawing.

By default, winners will receive gift codes for a free Telegram Premium subscription, but the organizer can add their own prizes. To ensure that the winner actually receives a subscription, the administrator will need to pay in advance for the selected number of subscriptions for the drawing. This can be done through PremiumBot or Fragment.

Each premium subscription won gives the channel 4 votes. They cannot be transferred: they will remain with the organizing channel for the entire duration of the gifted subscription. Just like regular votes from subscribers, these votes can improve the level of the channel and provide opportunities to publish more stories.

To coincide with the announcement of the new feature, Pavel Durov launched a large-scale giveaway - all subscribers of his channel are participating in the distribution of 10,000 codes for 6 months of Telegram Premium.

Along with support for sweepstakes, the mechanics of distributing votes for Premium subscribers have been slightly reworked. Now each user will have not one voice, as before, but four at once. If you bought a subscription yourself, you can manage all 4 votes: give everything to one channel or distribute it among several. If the subscription was given to you as a gift, you will receive 1 vote, and 3 will remain with the sender. And if you win the drawing, all 4 votes remain with the organizers, and the won Premium gives only basic bonuses such as the absence of advertising and an increased symbol limit.