Daily Marketing News, October 17, 2026: Telegram is testing a shared feed of channel posts
Telegram is testing a shared feed of posts from channels with a recommendations section, and this could become the first organic reach in a messenger where everything has always run on subscriptions and paid shoutouts. Meta is selling brands hours of guaranteed advertising, LinkedIn has started paying creators for consultations and videos, and on October 28 Instagram will remove linking Reels into series.
Story of the day: Telegram is testing a shared feed of channel posts with "For You" recommendations
On October 16, 2026 it became known that Telegram is testing a separate News tab. It's a shared feed of posts from channels. Right now you can only read channel posts in Telegram inside each individual channel. Since 2023 the messenger has also suggested similar channels, but as a list of channels, not as a feed of posts. The tab was found in beta 13.0 (283318) of the macOS client, and it's switched off on the server side. Judging by the code strings, the feed will sit in its own tab next to messages, calls, settings and contacts. There's no official announcement. The find was reported by the Russian outlets ppc.world and Kod.
The feed has 2 sections. Added collects posts from channels the person follows. For You shows posts based on interests: the user picks categories, each with its own name and emoji, and can change the set later. Everything else works like a familiar social network: search, pull to refresh, a counter of new posts, a read marker. From any post you can jump straight to the post itself, the channel or the chat.
Why this matters. Right now a Telegram channel's reach rests on 3 things: subscribers, paid shoutouts (paid mentions in other people's channels) and Telegram Ads, the messenger's official ad platform. A post is seen by the people who follow the channel and nobody else. If "For You" starts surfacing channels people don't follow, creators will get reach they don't have to pay for, for the first time. How Telegram will pick recommendations, and whether it will let channels you don't follow in there at all, isn't visible in the code, and the company hasn't commented.
I'm in no rush to celebrate. In 2018 Telegram already tried something similar on macOS: a beta had a Feed folder where you could move channels out of the main chat list and mute notifications for all of them at once. The feature was switched off on the server and never shipped. History keeps a record. Beta builds don't.
What creators can do right now: look at your post through the eyes of someone who is seeing your channel for the first time while scrolling a feed full of other people's content. The first line has to make sense without context, without "as I wrote yesterday" and without inside jokes. The channel's topic has to be clear, otherwise the algorithm won't know which "For You" category to put it in. A channel "about a bit of everything" will be the first to lose in a recommendation feed.
More news, October 17, 2026
Ads Super Burst works like booking airtime: the advertiser buys a window of 3 to 24 hours with guaranteed delivery and, optionally, category exclusivity, meaning competitors from the same niche don't run during that window. According to Meta, test campaigns reached 34 million people on average, ad recall rose by 2.9 points and purchase intent by 0.6 points. Access is rolling out in stages in October 2026. First Impression Ads is the first ad slot in the feed when someone opens Facebook, 1 brand per day. An early test is running in the US only, and Meta hasn't published pricing, results or plans for other countries. Meta used to have few fixed slots. Now you can buy reach the way you buy TV time. The format is built for launches tied to a specific day: a premiere, a sale, the start of preorders.
Reels Trending Ads are ads that run right after popular Reels on Facebook and Instagram. There used to be fewer topics. Now you can choose from 15 permanent ones, with new additions including "Home and Garden" and Spanish language content, plus seasonal topics around holidays and sports. According to Meta, campaigns using the format lifted action intent by more than 5 percentage points against control groups and added 5 points to unaided brand awareness. Later in 2026 you'll be able to exclude custom audiences. Aggregated View Time counts the total time a person spends with a brand over a week: according to Meta's research, 5 seconds accumulated over a week drove 32% more offline sales than 1 continuous 5-second view. Reels now account for more than half of the time spent on Instagram, so short touches are worth counting together, not one by one.
Advice Sessions let you sell 1 on 1 consultations right from your profile. The feature works in the US for subscribers on the Business Premium plan at $59.99 a month. A client books a slot within the next 30 days and pays through Stripe, built into the profile. The second addition is In-Stream Ads: invited US creators earn revenue from a preroll before their videos. Previously, ads next to creator content were sold through BrandLink and Thought Leader Ads, and the advertiser had to sign a partnership agreement in advance. Now the creator connects their own content to ad delivery. LinkedIn also updated the Dashboard in the profile: drafts, scheduled posts and analytics are now in 1 place. For consultants and experts in the US, this is a ready-made checkout right in the profile.
Edits now has Audio Links: a Reels creator adds a link to a specific song or sound, and viewers can listen to it with 1 tap. The trending topics section is open only to creators with more than 10,000 followers. Kits save a set of visual styles so you don't have to rebuild your look from scratch. Instagram added recording from a reference: open a Reel shorter than 90 seconds, tap the 3 dots menu, choose "Use as reference", and the reference plays in a small movable window inside the camera. For now it works on iOS, Android is planned. The key point for anyone running series: on October 28 Instagram will remove Reels linking, a feature launched in August 2025 to join videos into a series. It's time to move series navigation into captions, pinned posts or collections.
A lead form is a questionnaire a person fills out right inside the ad, without going to the website. Before, lead quality was judged manually or by uploading data from a CRM. Now you can add up to 12 answer options to 1 question and mark the ones that make a lead qualified. The path: Assets > Lead Form > Create Lead Form > Custom Questions. A lead with such an answer is automatically marked as qualified and goes into an automatically created conversion, "Lead form, Response qualified (Google-hosted)". According to Google's help center, the feature only works in Search campaigns, and qualifying questions are mandatory: you can't make them optional. Every required question in the form filters out some people, so 1 question about budget or timing is enough.
Certification is Google's permission without which casino and sportsbook ads don't run. Until now, applications could only be submitted through a form in the Google Ads Help Center. Now you can also apply right in the account: the Admin section, a new item Policy > Account. The old Help Center route remains. Google is rolling the feature out gradually, so not everyone will see it right away. Existing certificates and applications under review aren't affected. For now online gambling is the only category in the new list, and there's no exact date beyond October 2026. This matters for agencies running accounts in regulated niches: applying will be more convenient, but if you already have a certificate, you don't need to do anything.
Barry Schwartz, the outlet's editor, writes that for the first time in a long while he's seeing this picture: within 24 hours both tool readings and the number of webmaster complaints about rankings and clicks went up. Several services showed volatility, among them AccuRanker, Algoroo, AWR, Mozcast, SEMRush and Sistrix. Site owners on forums complained that conversions almost disappeared while traffic looked normal. A caveat: on October 12 the same outlet wrote that third party Google rank trackers were glitching, so part of the volatility could be noise in the data. Site owners should check tracker data against Search Console and their own sales analytics before rebuilding anything.
What creators, advertisers and site owners should do with this
- Telegram channel creators: reread the opening lines of your last 10 posts as if someone is seeing your channel for the first time in a shared feed, and narrow your topic down to 1 clear category.
- Creators running Reels series: before October 28, move series navigation into captions, pinned posts or collections. For response videos, try "Use as reference" on iOS.
- Advertisers with lead forms in Google Ads Search campaigns: add 1 required qualifying question about budget or timing, check that the "Response qualified" conversion landed in the Qualified lead goal, and compare the cost of a qualified lead with what you paid before.
- Site owners who saw a drop in Google: compare rank tracker data with Search Console and your own sales numbers before changing anything on the site.
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