WhatsApp Channels: the promise of Meta’s latest feature for publishers

On September 13th, Meta launched a new feature named WhatsApp Channels in more than 150 countries. First launched in June 2023 in a few countries, Channels is a “private broadcast messaging product.” With this feature, the company hopes to establish a direct communication channel within WhatsApp between organisations and thought leaders with their audience base. 

WhatsApp has a similar feature “Communities” which it launched last year in November. Despite the same aim of establishing a common platform between the admin and the followers, the two features are built for different uses. 

The Communities feature was created to bring people together on shared interests and topics. An admin can add up to 2000 members and, depending on the group setting, these members can interact on the platform. 

One massive drawback of the Communities feature is the lack of data protection. If a member joins Communities, their contact can be accessed by both the group admin and members.  

Unlike Communities, Channels is created with no limit on its followers. As of November 8th, CNN is one of the most-followed news sources on Channels with more than 4.4 million followers. Channels also offer complete data protection, as the contact details remain hidden from the entire group. Another advantage of WhatsApp’s Channels is that the news shared on the platform gets deleted from the user’s phone’s storage in 30 days. 

The feature only offers a one-way communication option and restricts people from interacting (except in reacting with an emoticon). With Channels, people would have to go to a separate section (Updates) to access the news. Though they have the option to turn on notifications, this makes Channels updates less prominent than direct messages. 

Unlike other apps that took some time to gain widespread traction, WhatsApp’s Channels came with an already established audience base. It motivated many publishers to launch their own Channels and also rewarded them well. Italy’s Tgcom24 is one such news platform that was able to gain more than a million followers on Channels in a short span of time. 

“In Brazil, for example, g1, one of the news sites with the largest audience, opened a channel on WhatsApp and in just a few weeks it reached more than 7 million subscribers. On Facebook, g1 took years to reach 11 million followers and the content shared there needs to go through the filter of algorithms that greatly limit its reach. Direct distribution, without algorithms, is a very clear benefit of WhatsApp channels for news organisations.”

Germany’s Der Spiegel (21.1K followers) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (9.8K); Spanish El País (79.6K) and El Mundo (36.9K) and Italian la Repubblica (63.3K) and Il Sole 24 Ore (37.8K) are all now on Channels. France 24 debuted on Channels on October 19 and now has over 883K followers. 

They have different approaches: France 24 posts twice a day whereas El País publishes more than 5 times a day. BBC News (1.1M followers) shares 1 story per post, whereas Süddeutsche Zeitung shares the top 3 stories of the day in a single post. 

The rise of TikTok as a source of news fits within the larger shift towards social and messaging platforms. Giuliander Carpes, a researcher of digital journalism and platforms at the Université de Toulouse, says, “recent research like the Digital News Report 2023 from the Reuters Institute, has shown that younger audiences aged 18 to 24 are twice as likely to use TikTok to get information than people aged 45 to 54 - which are still more prone to finding news on TV and even print newspapers.”

Carpes highlights two fundamental problems of gaining your news from such platforms. “There is already some consensus that young people are less active in searching for news - a phenomenon called incidental news consumption or news find me perception.” This phenomenon causes filter bubbles. 

WhatsApp has been a fertile ground for the spread of mis- and disinformation in many countries. With the introduction of Channels there is hope that it will be able to tackle this growing concern. Carpes says, “There will certainly be an increase in the distribution of credible news, produced by professional journalism. But it is difficult to say that this increase in the distribution of credible news will limit the circulation of mis/disinformation.” 

He notes, “I tend to believe it won't [stop disinformation] because disinformation is produced by extremely well-organised groups that learned how to exploit political polarisation to create narratives that spread fast on social media and messaging applications based on the emotions felt by people when receiving content. Perhaps more often than we would like, real news fails to confirm our biases and becomes way less likely to be shared than mis/disinformation.”

As many news organisations flock to Channels to ride the benefit of this new feature, Carpes warns about the potential drawbacks. “With audience engagement on Facebook and Twitter (now X) falling massively, many news organisations have flocked to WhatsApp as soon as this feature was launched. Despite WhatsApp not sharing more details about audience metrics with Channel owners.”

Carpes continues, “I would recommend that news organisations test this feature while taking into account the dangers of relying too much on third-party platforms for news distribution: creating an excessive dependence on third-party channels to reach audiences and the subjection to extremely contingent policies of these platforms, which is subject to changes without prior notice and which can drastically affect the operation.”

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