Almost everything written about this ad platform is second-hand, and it shows: the articles contradict each other on the most basic facts. This one was written by reading the platform's official documentation, and every concrete claim I make here is one you can check against the source named at the end.
What a sponsored message is
The platform has its own advertising system. Its only format is the sponsored message: a short block of text that appears inside public channels, at the end of the post stream, with a button beneath it.
According to the official documentation, these messages are shown in public channels with more than 1,000 subscribers. They do not appear in private chats or in conversations between people: the inventory is exclusively broadcast channels.
The ad is composed by filling in a template with a handful of fields: a title, some text and a URL. The URL is what generates the button shown below the message. It is a deliberately poor format — no image, no video, no carousel — and that poverty is part of the design: sponsored messages are meant not to jar too much inside a channel.
Many guides quote an exact character limit for the text. I do not repeat it, because I could not confirm it in the official documentation, and I would rather you saw it in the platform's own form, where the number is always current. What you can safely assume is that it is short: write for one or two sentences, not a paragraph.
The rule that changes everything: internal links only
Here is the quirk that makes this unlike any ad platform you have used. The official documentation is explicit: every link included in both the text field and the URL field must point to a channel or a bot inside the platform itself. Links to external sites are not permitted.
You cannot send the traffic to your website. A sponsored message always lands somewhere inside the platform.
It is worth sitting with the practical consequences, because they are large:
- Your landing page is a channel or a bot. All the conversion work you would normally do on a landing page — explaining the offer, handling objections, giving the next step — has to happen in the first screens of a channel or the first message of a bot. If the channel people land in is neglected, the ad has no way to compensate.
- The natural objective is subscription, not direct sale. The format pushes towards acquiring subscribers. Selling something in the same click does not fit how it is built.
- Measurement moves. With no external URL to hang campaign parameters on, attribution has to be solved inside the platform. That is exactly the problem I cover in the article on measurement, and it does have a solution.
How targeting works
Targeting here is conceptually different from the big advertising platforms, and it is probably the most interesting thing about it.
Instead of building audiences from personal data, inferred interests or behavioural history, you choose the specific channels where you want your ad shown, identifying them by their link. Context is the targeting: if a channel is about a topic, the people reading it have demonstrated that interest, and the inference stops there.
It is a model closer to buying space in a trade publication than to buying audiences on a data platform. It has one pleasant consequence — you are not dependent on profiling anyone — and one less comfortable one: the channel research is your job. No system optimises on your behalf to find where your audience is. Choosing the channels well is the campaign.
The official documentation warns that once an ad has been created, its targeting parameters cannot be modified. If you want to try a different set of channels, you create another ad. Keep that in mind before designing a testing plan: there is no "edit and carry on" here.
How you pay
The model is CPM: you pay per thousand views of the ad. The documentation sets a minimum of 0.1 Toncoin per thousand views, and payment is made in TON, the cryptocurrency the platform uses for this system.
The budget acts as a ceiling: you set an amount and the sponsored message keeps being shown until it is exhausted.
On minimum entry spend
And here we reach the figure most often repeated and least well supported. Searching for the minimum investment needed to start, you will find numbers that differ from one another by three orders of magnitude: from amounts that only make sense for large advertisers down to modest deposits.
It is not that some sources are lying. It is that there are different access routes — contracting directly, a self-serve platform, or authorised agencies reselling with their own minimums — and each article quotes the one it knows without saying which. Conditions have also shifted over time and by country.
So you will not find a figure in this article. It would be the number most likely to be wrong of everything written here. What I would suggest instead: look up the current amount on the platform itself, and if someone offers you access at a far lower minimum, understand that you are contracting with an intermediary and ask on what terms.
Approval
Ads go through review and can be rejected if they do not comply with the platform's advertising guidelines. In other words: creating an ad is not the same as publishing it, and it is worth reading those guidelines before investing time in producing creative.
Summary
| Where it appears | Public channels with more than 1,000 subscribers |
|---|---|
| Format | Title, short text and a URL that becomes a button |
| Permitted destination | Only channels or bots inside the platform. External sites, no |
| Targeting | By manually chosen channels; not built on personal data |
| Editable | No: targeting is fixed when the ad is created |
| Pricing model | CPM, minimum 0.1 Toncoin per thousand views, paid in TON |
| Minimum entry | Varies by access route — check on the platform |
If anything in this table does not match what you see on the platform today, believe the platform and tell me so I can correct it.
- Official documentation, Ad platform getting-started guide. This is the source of the 1,000-subscriber threshold, the ad fields, the restriction to internal destinations, the immutability of targeting and the 0.1 Toncoin minimum CPM.
- Official documentation, Ad platform — current conditions and amounts.