Setting up your channel listing
The setup wizard turns a registered channel into a described one: a polished name and description, a category, keywords, a price for each placement length, and who your audience is. It ends with Submit for review.
Three steps — Details, Pricing, Audience — with a live preview and a Listing completeness meter in the right-hand rail.
Before you start
- A channel already added to your account, at status Draft or Needs changes. A channel that is under review or approved opens a read-only panel instead of the wizard.
- Our bot still an administrator of the channel with the Post Messages right — pressing Submit for review re-runs the check.
- The channel's
OFCH-reference, if you are coming back to it later. It is the last part of the wizard's own address.
The wizard opens from Continue to setup on the preview card immediately after you add a channel, or by going straight to https://onflowads.com/telegram/dashboard/channels/ followed by the channel's OFCH- reference. That reference is printed in the channel's row in My channels, on the channel's own dashboard, and at the top of the wizard itself.
Step by step
- Open the wizard. Step 1, Channel details, is showing, with the hint "We pulled these in from Telegram — tweak anything that needs polishing."
- Fix anything in Channel details that Telegram got wrong or left blank, and add a Category, a Primary language and up to three Keywords. Upload a Channel photo here if the one pulled from Telegram is not the one you want.
- Press Continue. A brief Saved ✓ appears and step 2, Ad placement prices, opens.
- Price the required Stays 1 day placement — at least $1 — and switch on any longer placements you want to offer, setting each one's Pinned for hours and Price (USD). Tick Offer a discount on repeat orders if you want one.
- Press Continue. Step 3, Audience & source, opens.
- Set the Audience gender split with the slider and describe your Source of subscribers. This field is required and is read by a human reviewer.
- Press Submit for review. The bot-admin check runs again, and on success the wizard is replaced by the read-only Under review panel.
Every press of Continue posts the whole form — all three steps — not only the step you are leaving. A change you made on step 1 is saved when you press Continue on step 2. You can leave at any point and come back to the same address; whatever was on screen at your last Continue is what is stored.
Step 1 — Details
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Channel photo | Upload image takes a JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF up to 2 MB; Remove clears it. The photo pulled from Telegram is used until you change it |
| Channel name | Required. Up to 200 characters |
| Description | Up to 1,000 characters — a short pitch for advertisers |
| Category | One of: Crypto & Web3, Tech & Software, News & Media, Finance & Trading, Education & Courses, Books & Literature, Gaming & Esports, Entertainment, Marketing & Business, Lifestyle, Health & Fitness, Travel, Art & Design, Sports, Other |
| Primary language | One of: English, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian, French, German, Turkish, Persian, Other |
| Keywords (up to 3) | Type a word and press Enter or a comma to turn it into a chip; press the × on a chip to remove it. Each keyword is cut to 40 characters, duplicates are ignored, and the fourth one is refused |
Remove deletes the stored image and clears the link to the Telegram avatar it came from. The channel is then left with no photo at all until you upload one — it does not quietly fall back to the picture on Telegram. Upload a replacement rather than removing first if a photo is what you want.
Step 2 — Pricing
A placement is defined by two numbers: how long the ad stays in your channel, and how many hours it is pinned to the top. Prices are in US dollars, per placement.
| Row | Required? | Pinned for | The caption on the right |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stays 1 day | Required | Locked at 1 hr | 24h live |
| Stays 2 days | Optional | Defaults to 2 hrs | 48h live |
| Stays 3 days | Optional | Defaults to 3 hrs | 72h live |
| Stays 4 days | Optional | Defaults to 4 hrs | 96h live |
| Stays 5 days | Optional | Defaults to 5 hrs | 120h live |
| Stays 6 days | Optional | Defaults to 6 hrs | 144h live |
| Stays 7 days | Optional | Defaults to 7 hrs | 168h live |
- The 1-day placement is required and its pin is fixed at 1 hour. Its price must be at least $1.
- Optional placements are toggled on individually. Each one's Pinned for value is clamped so a pin can never outlast the stay: a 2-day placement can be pinned for at most 48 hours, a 7-day one for at most 168.
- A placement you switch on but leave unpriced is not stored at all. Nothing warns you about it, so check the preview rail — an offer you meant to make will be missing from it.
- Offer a discount on repeat orders reveals a Repeat-order discount (max 90%) field, held between 1% and 90%.
- The ceiling on any single price is $1,000,000.
The preview rail summarises what you have priced as one line per tier, in the shape 1d · $5 · pin 1h, or "No prices set yet." when there is nothing to show.
The word means two different things on two different screens, so it is worth separating them once.
- Here, in the registry wizard, "Pinned for 1 hr" means what it says: the post is pinned to the top of your channel for that hour.
- On a Paid Promotions rate card, a format such as "1 hour at the top · 24 hours in feed" is not a pin. It means the ad is the newest post in your channel for that hour — you publish nothing else — and posting over it costs reliability rather than breaking a pin. A pin there is a separate paid extra.
These are two separate price sheets on two separate screens, and filling one in does not fill in the other. See Listing your channel on Paid Promotions.
Step 3 — Audience
- Audience gender split — the slider reads Men X% and Women Y%, and the two always total 100.
- Source of subscribers — required, up to 2,000 characters. The placeholder asks the actual question: "How did you grow this channel? e.g. organic, cross-promotions, paid ads on specific platforms…" A reviewer reads this, so specifics help.
- Automatically approve ad requests from trusted advertisers — marked Soon.
The completeness meter
The right rail shows a Listing completeness percentage over eight items. Each is worth exactly 12.5%, so the meter moves in eighths.
The eight items are: a channel name, a description, a category, a primary language, at least one keyword, a photo, at least one priced placement, and a source of subscribers.
Below 100% the hint reads "A more complete listing gets more bookings." At 100% it changes to "Looking great — ready to submit!"
Clicking the channel name inside the preview card opens the wizard's own channel-details view — headline stats, content mix, listing information, ad prices and up to eight recent posts. It is reachable only from here, and only while the wizard is editable.
Losing it when you submit costs you nothing, because it is no longer the deep view of a channel. The channel's own dashboard shows strictly more — Telegram's creation date and the channel's age, its verified / scam / fake / restricted flags, slow mode, reactions and shares per post, posting cadence, admin and online counts, a trend line per metric, what all four engines have done with it, and what it has earned — and it stays open at every status, including under review and approved.
What the wizard requires versus what the server requires
The wizard's own checklist is stricter than the rule the server enforces. That matters because a channel created by a cross-promotion never goes through the wizard, and can therefore be submitted with far less filled in.
| Item | The wizard blocks submit without it | The server actually requires it |
|---|---|---|
| A channel name | Yes — "Add a channel name." | Yes — "Add a channel title before submitting." |
| A description | Yes — "Add a short description." | No |
| A category | Yes — "Choose a category." | No |
| A primary language | Yes — "Choose a primary language." | No |
| At least one keyword | Yes — "Add at least one keyword." | No |
| A 1-day price of $1 or more | Yes — "Set the required 1-day price (at least $1)." | Yes — "Set a price for the required 1-day placement (at least $1) before submitting." |
| A source of subscribers | Yes — "Tell us where your subscribers came from." | Yes — "Tell us your subscriber source before submitting." |
| An audience split totalling 100 | Not checked — the slider guarantees it | Yes — "Audience split (male % + female %) must add up to 100." |
The wizard's messages all appear prefixed with "Almost there — " and jump you to the step that needs fixing, in the order above.
What review decides — and what it does not
Submitting puts the channel in a moderation queue that a Master admin works through. On a decision:
- Approved — the panel reads Approved & live 🎉, "Your channel is approved and live in the cross-promotion network." From that point the channel's avatar is publicly viewable through Onflow Ads, where before approval only you and reviewers could see it.
- Needs changes — the wizard reopens for editing with a red banner reading "Changes requested:" and the reviewer's note. Fix what was flagged and submit again; resubmitting clears the old note and puts you back in the queue.
They are two separate queues with two separate flows. Selling sponsored posts means enrolling a channel at List a channel (/telegram/dashboard/paid-promotion/new), which keeps its own listing, its own prices and its own review — and which has a 1,000 subscriber minimum this one does not. Confusingly, a channel that is pending or approved here is tagged with a Paid Promotions chip in your hub's My channels list. That chip is wrong; it does not mean you have a marketplace listing. See Listing your channel for the real thing.
If something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A read-only Under review panel instead of the wizard | The channel is Pending or Approved — both are locked | Wait for the decision. Editing reopens only if it comes back as Needs changes |
| "This channel is locked while it's under review." | You tried to save, upload or remove a photo on a pending or approved channel | Nothing can unlock it from your side; contact support if the listing genuinely has to change |
| "That image is over 2 MB — pick a smaller one." | Your browser refused the file before uploading it | Compress the image below 2 MB |
| "That image is over the 2 MB limit. Please upload a smaller one." | The same limit, enforced again on the server | Compress the image |
| "Please upload a JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF image." | The file is not one of those formats. The type is detected from the file's own contents, so renaming it does not help | Convert the image |
| "Almost there — …" | The wizard's own checklist stopped the submit and jumped you to the step at fault | Fill in the field it names |
| The amber verification panel appears at submit | The bot was removed from your channel, or lost the Post Messages right, since you added it | Re-add the bot and submit again — see Verifying your channel |
| "That channel was already submitted." | Two submits raced each other | It is in the queue; nothing more to do |
| Your photo uploaded but renders as a broken image | The upload was accepted on its file header alone; a truncated or corrupt file can pass that check | Re-save the image from an editor and upload it again |
Related
- Adding a channel — how a channel gets here in the first place
- Editing channel details — changing a listing, and when it locks
- Verifying your channel — the check that runs again at submit
- Listing your channel on Paid Promotions — the other, separate review queue
Next: Managing your channels — the hub's My channels list, and which rows open a full dashboard.