A Portrait of the Telegram Mini Apps Customer

Telegram Mini Apps have their favorite currency: users. Millions of accounts, hundreds of thousands of wallets, huge MAU figures, daily activity, referrals, and impressive numbers in pitch decks.

But there is one problem with all of this.

A user is not the same thing as a buyer.

And in TMA, that difference matters even more, because behind a single user count there may be a real person, a second account, a third account, a bot, a farm, a referral created for a reward, or someone who opened the app once because of a future airdrop.

That is why the question “How many users do you have?” is far less interesting today than another one:

How many of them have ever spent their own money?

That is where the real portrait of the Telegram Mini Apps customer begins.

Who Actually Uses Telegram

Telegram can no longer be treated as a platform used almost exclusively by young people.

According to a detailed age breakdown from Mediascope, the largest share of Telegram’s audience is made up of users aged 25–44. Around 20% were in the 25–34 group and roughly 22% were 35–44. Users aged 18–24 accounted for about 14%, while teenagers aged 12–17 made up around 10%.

So the problem is clearly not that Telegram is supposedly full of teenagers with no money.

There is a large adult audience there: working professionals, entrepreneurs, investors, and people with disposable income.

But that does not mean these are the same people who form the core audience of a typical tap-to-earn or airdrop-driven TMA.

And that brings us to a much more important question:

Who does the product mechanic itself actually attract?

TMA Does Not Attract the Entire Telegram Audience

A Mini App lowers the barrier to entry almost as much as possible.

There is nothing to download. No new account is required. Registration often takes seconds. The user presses a button and is already inside.

For growth, this is almost perfect.

But that is exactly why the raw user count in a TMA has very little value on its own.

A person may have entered out of curiosity, for a bonus, through a referral, because of an airdrop, or through an extra account. They may not be a real customer at all, let alone someone willing to invest their own money.

That is why there can be a huge gap between the words “user” and “customer” in TMA.

TMA Trained Users to Come for Money, Not With Money

This may be the central conflict of the entire model.

For several years, users were taught the same routine: come back every day, complete tasks, collect points, invite friends, and wait for the token.

They were not asked to pay.

Quite the opposite.

They were promised that eventually, the project might pay them.

That created a habit. When another TMA appears, a large part of the crypto audience does not first ask:

“What can I buy here?”

They ask something much simpler:

“What do I get?”

That is a completely different type of behavior.

A traditional buyer arrives with a need and money.

An airdrop-driven TMA user arrives expecting a reward.

Trying to treat those two people as the same type of customer is rather strange.

Catizen Showed the Real Gap

Catizen is one of the clearest examples.

According to the project’s own data, the game had around 28.5 million players in 2024. But the number of paying users was around 590,000.

That means only about 2% of the total audience actually made a purchase.

And this is particularly interesting because Catizen cannot be described as a failure.

The project reported around $20 million in in-game purchases, with average revenue per paying user of roughly $34.

So commerce inside TMA clearly exists.

But the gap between a player and a buyer is enormous.

About 98% of the audience never became paying users.

That is the number worth looking at.

Not total launches. Not account counts. Not MAU.

What matters is how many people actually paid.

And Even 2% Does Not Mean Investors

There is another important distinction.

Someone who buys a $5 or $10 in-game item is not the same kind of customer as someone willing to put $2,000 into the project’s token.

The first made a micro-purchase for entertainment.

The second is making an investment decision.

So even the number of paying users does not fully answer the question of future demand for a token.

A project can have hundreds of thousands of people willing to buy in-game items while having almost no audience willing to commit serious capital to the project’s asset itself.

That is where the conflict between the product model and the investment model begins.

So Who Is the Real TMA Customer?

If you remove the marketing numbers, the audience can be divided into at least four layers.

The first is the person who simply opened the app.

The second is an active user who keeps returning for the game, tasks, or rewards.

The third is a paying user who is willing to spend a small amount inside the product.

And only the fourth is someone willing to put meaningful money into the project’s token or ecosystem.

These are four very different groups.

Yet in a project presentation, they are often reduced to one word:

Users.

That is why huge numbers by themselves explain very little.

Understanding Crypto Is Not Enough

The younger audience is not necessarily unfamiliar with crypto.

Quite the opposite. Among Gen Z and millennials, the share of people who currently own crypto or have owned it in the past is significantly higher than average. According to Gemini’s 2025 research, that figure was around 48% for Gen Z and 52% for millennials.

So the issue is not that users do not understand what wallets, tokens, or blockchains are.

They may understand all of that perfectly well.

The real question is much simpler:

Why should they buy your token?

Now Imagine Someone With Money

Take a potential investor who can comfortably allocate two or three thousand dollars per month to crypto.

An entrepreneur. An investor. A high-income professional.

How well is the typical TMA mechanic actually designed for that person?

Will they log in every day for a few extra points, spend hours completing tasks, collect little NFTs, and invite friends for another bonus?

Of course, there are exceptions.

But mass-market mechanics are not built on exceptions.

If a product is best at retaining someone who is willing to spend a couple of hours for a few potential dollars, it is strange to expect that same audience to later start buying the token for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

And that is where the real problem begins.

The Most Dangerous Audience Is the One That Got Everything for Free

After the airdrop, the situation becomes even more interesting.

The project goes to market and points to its huge audience. Marketing treats that as an advantage.

An investor may see something completely different.

They see a crowd whose monetary cost basis is zero.

Those users received tokens for time, clicks, tasks, referrals, or multiple accounts. They do not need the price to double, and they do not need to recover the cost of buying in.

For them, almost any price above zero can already look like profit.

Someone who bought $1,000 worth of the token has a completely different motivation.

They need the price to rise.

The airdrop recipient only needs liquidity.

One comes to buy.

The other is waiting for a chance to sell.

And Then a Large Audience Becomes a Problem

This is where a mass airdrop can start working against the project itself.

The team spends months gathering users, distributing points, pushing referrals, and building expectations around a free token.

Then it tries to convince new investors to buy that same token with real money.

But the investor sees thousands or millions of people who received the asset for almost nothing.

And asks a perfectly logical question:

Why should I be the person paying for their exit?

The more airdrop hunters there are around the project, the greater the potential selling pressure.

And the less attractive the asset may look to a new buyer.

That creates a paradox.

A project spends years building a huge free audience and then wonders why serious capital is in no hurry to stand on the other side of that trade.

A User, a Buyer, and an Investor Are Not the Same Thing

That is the core mistake behind many Telegram Mini Apps.

Projects have learned how to attract attention, generate registrations, connect wallets, and create activity. But none of that answers the main commercial question.

How many people are actually willing to pay?

And even more importantly:

How many are willing to pay a second time?

Because a real business does not begin when someone presses Start.

It begins when someone voluntarily takes out their own money.

And if a project expects to turn a huge free audience into buyers of its own token after an airdrop, it should first ask itself one very simple question:

Sources

Mediascope — Telegram audience age structure

Catizen — audience, paying users and in-game purchase data

Gemini — Global State of Crypto 2025