NEWSLETTER
Every day, about three dozen newsletters arrive in my inbox. Some are focusing on the new thesis that venture capitalists are developing for the Indian and crypto markets. Most watch the newsgathering. The rise of Substack has allowed many journalists to quit their newsroom jobs and start something of their own. So the subscriber list keeps growing. But keeping up with even a quarter of these newsletters in the sea of hundreds of other emails has become a hassle.
So I was thrilled to find out that WhatsApp, the app I use every few minutes, seems to be planning a game with bulletins. According to WaBetaInfo, a blog that tracks new WhatsApp developments, the instant messaging app is working on a “private newsletter tool.”
The tool is currently under development and is scheduled to ship in a future app update, the website said, which found the clues while reviewing the code.
The Meta-owned service had no immediate comment.
WhatsApp already gives people the ability to “broadcast” their messages to many people at once. It is a revolutionary feature that can allow you to have open dialogs with multiple people at the same time. It seems that the current thinking with the newsletter feature is to extend this use case. WaBetaInfo, which has a stellar track record of detecting upcoming changes, says that this newsletter feature “will be a one-to-many tool for conveying information.”
Details are scant at the moment, and there’s also a chance WhatsApp might change its mind at some point about this new feature and scrap the project.
But suppose it doesn’t do that. What could the arrival of WhatsApp mean for the burgeoning but small newsletter industry? And what about WhatsApp?
WhatsApp has 2 billion daily active users. Even if a small fraction of this user base shows interest in newsletters, a category that the vast majority of them don’t even know exists, WhatsApp can become the biggest newsletter player in a month. (Many people already use the WhatsApp distribution channel to promote their newsletters.) As more people start reading newsletters, the market for newsletters is likely to grow as well. So it’s not necessarily the worst thing for incumbents like Substack, although it probably is bad.
WhatsApp could provide a superior newsletter experience by giving users the ability to read all the newsletters within the instant messaging app. The open rate will skyrocket and WhatsApp can offer more sophisticated analytics to those who write those newsletters.
In newsletters, WhatsApp can also find a way to get its users to spend even more time on the app. As WhatsApp prepares its commercial offers, in newsletters you can also find a way to better serve brands.
As one industry executive joked to me: “Every brand wants to use WhatsApp reach, but there is no analytics and you don’t know who is clicking on the messages. Also, many branded messages are marked as spam even if users opted in to receive them by signing up for a 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 through emails.”
Don’t kill the project, WhatsApp team.
