Spurned by social media, publishers 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 2 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 organizations.

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).

Meta courted publishers several times in the past, only to change strategy a year or two later. In 2015, for example, Facebook struck partnerships with publishers to host entire articles on the social media service, which helped the articles load faster. The company ended that program, but then introduced a number of different initiatives to fund journalism, including a News tab and millions of dollars in content deals for publishers.

The journalism initiatives petered out, too. In recent years, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, and some of his lieutenants signaled 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.

"It's not like social media traditionally, because you, as a user, control what you want to see, and can check it when you want to," said Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp. "Alongside of private messaging, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams and organizations across WhatsApp."

Newton-Rex likened the product to how people received email newsletters, something that her team focused on when designing the Channels product. She noted that people regularly forwarded links and messages they found on Channels to their own private chat groups, allowing more people to discover news articles or updates from other people or companies running their own Channels.

Meta has also hinted that it may introduce paid Channels in the future, a way for people and organizations to make money by offering exclusive posts or content to their subscribers. It is a well-worn path taken by companies like Patreon, OnlyFans and, more recently, X.

The Financial Times, rather than creating one main channel, has three active channels on specific topics: the financial markets (209,000 followers), the Israel-Hamas war (53,000 followers) and the US election (22,000 followers). Rachel Banning-Lover, the head of social media and development at The FT, said the markets channel started a year ago with the posting of one article a day that was free to read.

"It grew really quickly," Banning-Lover said. "I think we were aiming to hit 40,000 people in the first three months -- we got there in the first few weeks."

After the Israel-Hamas war began, The FT started a channel that at first provided a daily briefing to catch up on each day's news about the war as a way to combat misinformation being shared on the platform and other social media sites.

Banning-Lover said the success of a WhatsApp Channel somewhat depended on whether people had signed up for push notifications for Channels. Users have to opt in to receive the notifications, and WhatsApp doesn't provide publishers with any data on how many followers have opted in.

The FT surveyed users three months into its experiment with WhatsApp Channels and found that many wanted more push notifications from the publication's channel, Banning-Lover said.

"The thing we don't want to happen is we don't want people to switch push notifications off," she said.

Banning-Lover said The FT was able to determine the geographic locations of its readers through tags added to the web link shared in its Channel.

"India, U.K. and US are our biggest audiences, but we also have a lot of people from the global south," she said. "It's quite interesting, and we're really pleased we've reached people we wouldn't usually."

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

"We are deliberately trying to have lengthy posts," she said. "We think we can stand out by doing that. If people just stay in the app and are consuming our information, we think that's great."

Sharma said Vox had experimented with publishing more news articles on the weekend and at different hours to cater to international audiences, and planned to use the channel to crowdsource questions for its new podcast, "Explain It to Me."

The Atlantic is viewing its WhatsApp Channel, which has 2.8 million followers, as a place of experimentation rather than a major source of traffic, said Adrienne LaFrance, the publication's executive editor.

"We see the occasional WhatsApp post drive a small wave of readers but nowhere near at the scale of platforms like Facebook or Google -- even in this new post-social-distribution era of the web," she said.

But LaFrance said it was important for The Atlantic to "meet our audiences wherever they are."

"The social web is undergoing this dramatic change, and that can be unnerving, but it also, even more than that, means huge opportunities for journalists to connect to audiences in new ways," she said.