Spurned by social media, publishers now chase readers on WhatsApp

Many digital news publishers have been desperately searching for a life raft. Traffic to news sites has fallen sharply, along with the ad revenue those clicks generate, partly because Google and Facebook decided to make news less prominent on their platforms.
 

Now, some publications have found a glimmer of hope elsewhere: WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app.
 

Late last year, the app introduced WhatsApp Channels, a kind of one-way broadcasting system that allows publishers to send links and headlines directly to followers. Numerous outlets are using it as a way to draw in readers and build direct relationships with an audience that is largely outside the United States.
 

“It has become a huge source of traffic actually, larger than X,” said Marta Planells, senior director of digital news at Noticias Telemundo, the news arm of Telemundo.
 

The Noticias Telemundo channel on WhatsApp gained more than 30,000 followers in just the first two weeks and now has more than 820,000 followers, Planells said. The news outlet often creates original content for its channel, such as short videos from reporters on the ground or a poll on a news topic.
 

“WhatsApp is a big community for Hispanics — it is the platform to go to to talk to family members and friends, outside the US especially,” she said. Meta, which owns the app, says about 1.9 billion of its two billion users live outside the United States.

WhatsApp Channels exist in a separate tab from the main messaging section of the app. People, businesses or organizations can create a channel to send video, text or links to anyone who follows them. Users do not have to provide private information like their phone numbers or email addresses to follow a channel. Followers can react to posts with an emoji, but they are unable to comment with text.
 

The traffic created by WhatsApp still pales in comparison with what Google and Facebook send to publications. And some publishers are cautious about getting too enamored by Channels. Meta, which is also the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has a long and complicated history with news organisations.
 

But Channels is one of the few sources of traffic trending upward, and is part of a push by many publishers to develop direct relationships with audiences and, potentially, drive them back to outlets’ home pages or apps, rather than rely on the social media platforms. Numerous media outlets have signed up for WhatsApp Channels and already drawn millions of followers, including CNN (14.5 million followers), The New York Times (14 million), BBC News (9.3 million), The New York Post (8.1 million), The Wall Street Journal (4.7 million), and The Washington Post (3.8 million).
 

The journalism initiatives petered out, too. In recent years, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, and some of his lieutenants signalled that they were not interested in featuring as much hard news or political content across their platforms.
This year, Meta said it would shut down the News tab and “better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”
 

But Meta executives believe that Channels offers a more targeted and personal way to send articles and posts to followers, especially because it comes in the form of a text message update. It is a different experience from mixing in articles with other posts and videos like the Facebook news feed, they say.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)