Skip to main content

WhatsApp said to plot a newsletter play

Every day, about three dozen newsletters drop into my inbox. Some focus on the new thesis venture capitalists are developing for the Indian and crypto markets. Most look at news gathering. The rise of Substack has allowed many journalists to quit their newsroom jobs and start something of their own. So the subscription list continues to grow. But keeping up with even a quarter of these newsletters in the sea of hundreds of others emails has grown to become a pain.

Which is why I was thrilled to find that WhatsApp, the app I use every few minutes, appears to be planning a play with newsletters. According to WaBetaInfo, a blog that hunts for new WhatsApp developments, the instant messaging app is working on a “private newsletter tool.”

The tool is currently under development and is slated to ship in a future update of the app, the website said, which found the hints by combing through the code.

The Meta-owned service did not immediately comment.

WhatsApp already offers individuals the ability to “broadcast” their messages to many people at once. It’s a game-changing feature that can allow you to have dialogues open with multiple people at once. It appears that the current thinking with the newsletter feature is to expand on this use case. WaBetaInfo, which has a stellar record of spotting forthcoming changes, says this newsletter feature “will be a one-to-many tool for broadcasting information.”

Details are scant at this time, and there is also the possibility that WhatsApp might just change its mind at some point about this new feature and scrap the project.

But let’s assume it doesn’t do that. What could the arrival of WhatsApp mean for the burgeoning, but tiny newsletter industry? And what’s in it for WhatsApp?

WhatsApp has 2 billion daily active users. Even if a tiny fraction of this user base shows interests in newsletters — a category that the vast majority of them don’t know exists yet — WhatsApp can become the biggest newsletter player in a month. (Plenty of people already use WhatsApp’s distribution channel to promote their newsletters.) As more people start reading newsletters, the market of newsletters will likely grow, too. So it’s not necessarily the worst thing for incumbents such as Substack — though it’s probably bad.

WhatsApp could provide a superior newsletter experience by offering users the ability to read all the newsletters within the instant messaging app. The open rate will go off the roof and WhatsApp can offer more sophisticated analytics to those writing those newsletters.

In newsletters, WhatsApp can also find a way to get its users to spend even more time on the app. As WhatsApp gears up its business offerings, in newsletters it can also find a way to better serve brands.

As an industry executive quipped to me, “Every brand wants to utilise the reach of WhatsApp but there’s no analytics and you don’t know who is clicking on messages. Also a lot of branded messages get marked as spam even if users had agreed to receive them while signing up for some service. WhatsApp has a much larger audience base than any other platform and the engagement rate is much higher. It allows brands to reach audiences beyond those you can reach via emails.”

Don’t kill the project, team WhatsApp.

WhatsApp said to plot a newsletter play by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch



source https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/21/whatsapp-newsletter/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Max Q: Psyche(d)

In this issue: SpaceX launches NASA asteroid mission, news from Relativity Space and more. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/h6Kjrde via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

Max Q: Anomalous

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Last week wasn’t the most successful for spaceflight missions. We’ll get into that a bit more below. In this issue: First up, a botched launch from Virgin Orbit… …followed by one from ABL Space Systems News from Rocket Lab, World View and more Virgin Orbit’s botched launch highlights shaky financial future After Virgin Orbit’s launch failure last Monday, during which the mission experienced an  “anomaly” that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, I went back over the company’s financials — and things aren’t looking good. For Virgin Orbit, this year has likely been completely turned on its head. The company was aiming for three launches this year, but everything will remain grounded until the cause of the anomaly has been identified and resolved. It’s unclear how long that will take, but likely at least three months. Add this delay to Virgin’s dwindling cash reserves and you have a foundation that’s suddenly much shakier than before. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What’s Stripe’s deal?

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Stripe eyes exit, reportedly tried raising at a lower valuation The big news in fintech this week revolved around payments giant Stripe . On January 26, my Equity Podcast co-host and overall amazingly talented reporter Natasha Mascarenhas and I teamed up to write about how Stripe had set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuin...
Post a Comment
Read more