After Social Media Rejection, Publishers Chase Readers on WhatsApp

Many digital news publishers have been desperately searching for a lifeline. Visits to news sites have fallen sharply, along with the advertising revenue those clicks generate, in part because Google and Facebook have decided to make news less prominent on their platforms.

Now, some posts 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. Many outlets use these channels as a way to engage readers and build direct relationships with an audience largely located outside the United States.

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

Ms. Planells said Noticias Telemundo’s WhatsApp channel gained more than 30,000 followers in just the first two weeks and now has more than 820,000 followers. The news organization 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 huge community for Hispanics, it’s the go-to platform to talk to family and friends, especially outside the United States,” she said. Meta, which owns the app, says about 1.9 billion of its 2 billion users live outside the United States.

WhatsApp channels are located in a separate tab from the main messaging section of the app. Individuals, businesses, or organizations can create a channel to send videos, text messages, or links to anyone they follow. Users don’t have to provide private information like their phone number or email address to follow a channel. Followers can reply to posts with an emoji, but they can’t comment with text.

The traffic WhatsApp generates is still tiny compared to what Google and Facebook send to publications, and some publishers are wary of being too drawn to channels. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has a long and complicated history with news organizations.

But channels are one of the few sources of traffic that are trending upward, and are part of many publishers’ efforts to develop direct relationships with audiences, perhaps driving them back to outlets’ homepages or apps, rather than relying on social media platforms.

Several media outlets have signed up to WhatsApp channels and have already attracted 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).

Meta has tried to court publishers several times in the past, but changed its strategy after a year or two. In 2015, for example, Facebook partnered with publishers to host full articles on the social media service, which helped articles load faster. The company ended that program, but has since introduced a number of different initiatives to fund journalism, including a news tab and millions of dollars in content deals for publishers.

Journalistic initiatives have also faded. In recent years, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and some of his lieutenants have indicated that they are not interested in offering much serious news or political content on their platforms. This year, Meta announced plans to expand its reach. He said This will close the News tab and “better align our investments with the products and services people value most.”

But Meta executives believe Channels offer a more targeted and personalized way to send articles and posts to followers, especially since they come in the form of a text message update. They say it’s a different experience than merging articles with other posts and videos like Facebook’s News Feed.

“It’s not like traditional social media, because as a user you control what you want to see, and you can check it out when you want,” said Alice Newton-Ricks, WhatsApp’s head of product. “In addition to direct messages, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams, and organizations on WhatsApp.”

Ms. Newton-Ricks likened the product to the way people receive email newsletters, something her team focused on when designing Channels. She noted that people regularly forward links and messages they find on Channels to their chat groups, allowing more people to discover news articles or updates from other people or companies who run their Channels.

Meta has also indicated that it may offer paid channels in the future, a way for individuals and organizations to earn money by offering exclusive posts or content to their subscribers. It’s a familiar path taken by companies like Patreon, OnlyFans and, most recently, X.

The FT doesn’t have a single main channel, but rather three active channels covering specific topics: financial markets (209,000 followers), the war between Israel and Hamas (53,000 followers), and the US election (22,000 followers). The markets channel began a year ago, publishing one article a day for free, says Rachel Banning-Lover, the FT’s head of social media and development.

“It has grown very quickly,” said Ms Banning-Lover. “I think we were aiming for 40,000 people in the first three months – we reached that target in the first few weeks.”

After the war between Israel and Hamas began, the Financial Times launched a channel that initially provided a daily briefing to find out the day’s news about the war, as a way to combat misinformation circulating on the platform and other social media sites.

Ms. Banning-Lover said the success of a WhatsApp channel depends to some extent on whether people have opted in to receive the channels’ push notifications. Users have to opt in to receive notifications, and WhatsApp doesn’t provide publishers with any data on how many followers have opted in to receive notifications.

Banning-Lover said the Financial Times conducted a user survey three months after its trial with WhatsApp channels, and found that many wanted more push notifications from the publishing channel.

“The thing we don’t want to happen is we don’t want people to turn off push notifications,” she said.

Ms Banning-Lover said the Financial Times was able to geo-tagging its readers through tags added to a web link shared on its channel.

“India, the UK and the US are our biggest audiences, but we also have a lot of people from the global south. It’s interesting, and we’re really happy that we’re reaching people that we wouldn’t normally reach,” she added.

Swati Sharma, publisher and editor-in-chief of Vox.com, said Vox was trying to reach “non-news-obsessed” and global audiences through its WhatsApp channel, which has 482,000 followers. She said the outlet sees it primarily as a way to build brand awareness and introduce new products, such as podcasts and newsletters, rather than as a source of traffic.

“We intentionally try to have posts that are long, and we think we can stand out by doing that,” she said. “If people stay on the app and consume our information, we think that’s great.”

Ms. Sharma said Fox has experimented with running more news stories on weekends and at different hours to cater to international audiences, and plans to use the channel to solicit questions from the audience for its new podcast.Explain that to me“.”

Similarly, The Atlantic views its WhatsApp channel, which has 2.8 million followers, as a place for experimentation rather than a major source of traffic, said Adrienne LaFrance, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

“We see the occasional WhatsApp post drive a small wave of readership but nowhere near the scale of platforms like Facebook or Google — even in the new post-social web era,” she said.

But Ms. LaFrance said it was important for The Atlantic to “meet our audience where they are.”

“The social network is undergoing this radical change, which can be disturbing, but it also means, more than that, tremendous opportunities for journalists to connect with audiences in new ways,” she said.