News outlets rejected by social media are chasing readers via WhatsApp

Many digital news publishers are desperate for a life raft. Traffic to news sites has plummeted, as has the advertising revenue generated by those clicks, in part because Google and Facebook have chosen to reduce the visibility of news on their platforms.

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

In late 2023, the app introduced WhatsApp channels, a type of one-way broadcast system that allows publishers to send links and headlines directly to followers. Many stores use this as a way to attract readers and build direct relationships with audiences that are largely located outside the United States.

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

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, Planells said. A news outlet often creates original content for its channel, such as short videos of reporters on the ground or a survey on a given topic.

“WhatsApp is a big community for Latinos — it’s a platform where you can talk to family members and friends, especially outside the United States,” she said. Meta, the app’s owner, says about 1.9 billion of its 2 billion users live outside the United States.

WhatsApp feeds are located on a separate tab, outside the main messaging section of the app. People, companies or organizations can create a channel to send videos, texts or links to anyone who follows them. Users don’t have to provide private information like a phone number or email address to follow a channel. Followers can react to posts using emojis, but cannot comment via text.

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

However, channels are one of the few traffic sources that are trending upwards and are part of many publishers’ efforts to develop direct relationships with their audiences and potentially drive them back to their home pages or outlet apps rather than relying on social media. platforms.

Numerous 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).

In the past, Meta has courted publishers several times, only to change its strategy a year or two later. For example, in 2015, Facebook partnered with publishers to share entire articles on the social media site, which helped articles load faster. The company ended that program, but then rolled out a number of different initiatives to fund journalism, including a News tab and multi-million-dollar content deals for publishers.

Journalistic initiatives have also ended. In recent years, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, and some of his deputies have signaled that they are not interested in presenting so much hard news and political content on their platforms. This year, Meta said it would close the News tab and “better align our investments with our products and services that people value most.”

However, Meta executives believe that Channels offers a more targeted and personal way to send articles and posts to followers, especially since it is available via SMS updates. They say it’s a completely different experience than linking articles to other posts and videos, such as Facebook news feeds.

“It’s not like traditional social media because as a user you have control over what you want to see and you can check it whenever you want,” said Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp. “In addition to private messages, people reported wanting to learn more about topics, teams and organizations on WhatsApp.”

Ms. Newton-Rex compared the product to the way people receive email newsletters, which was something her team focused on when designing the Channels product. She noticed that people regularly forwarded links and messages they found on channels to their private chat groups, allowing more people to discover articles or news from other people or companies running their own channels.