Media success on Whatsapp channels

To access its channels, simply go to the news menu. They take the form of a Whatsapp conversation and allow personalities or media to communicate with their community. All you have to do is subscribe to those that interest us and then only the person who is at the head of the channel can post content. We therefore receive notifications in the form of Whatsapp messages when this is the case. It’s exactly the same concept as broadcast channels on Instagram. Concept which was popularized by Telegram, and which Meta took over.

And Whatsapp channels work very well. For example, the rapper Soprano’s channel is followed by more than 800 thousand people. And yet there is only one post: his tour dates. Dj Snake is also followed by more than 400 people on his channel where he posts behind the scenes of his tours. Funny photos and messages. And then for some it can even be counted in millions. American rapper Bad Bunny’s channel is followed by more than 13 million people even though he created it 1 week ago.

And then, the same for influencers. Most of them are very powerful on Instagram, we know. So almost all of them have distribution channels on Insta. Except that some have also created Whatsapp channels, and surprise… They exceed those of Instagram! This is the case of Tibo Inshap for example, the first YouTuber in France. On his Insta channel, he has more than 140 thousand subscribers, while his WhatsApp channel has almost double that number. And yet, he posts the same content on both: ads for his own products. But surprisingly, the channels that work best today on WhatsApp are not those of influential personalities.

These are those of the media. CNN has 14.5 million subscribers, The New York Times 14 million, the BBC 9.3 million, Telemundo almost 1 million. For us, the one that is the most successful is that of France 24 with 4.5 million subscribers.

In fact, it’s very practical, especially for those who don’t want to have too many applications on their phone, who don’t open the newspaper every morning but who are still interested in the news. And then, on the other hand, the media benefit from the power of Whatsapp which has more than 2 billion users worldwide.

As a result, the media seeks to talk to as many people as possible, including young people, who today get a lot of information on Tiktok. Le Monde, for example, created a channel dedicated to adolescents and it has almost 100,000 subscribers. They provide summaries of subjects that interest young people such as Griezman’s retirement or the last season of Heartstopper… But the newspaper will also talk to them about the conflict between Hamas and Israel or the curfew in Guadeloupe. It’s quite complete and it’s a change from Tiktok video content.

So I know that all the media are also on Tiktok obviously, but the difference with Whatsapp is that there is no algorithm that will play with our information, and at times offer us content filled with fake news. No, these are posts written by serious journalists, who check their sources and who are as close as possible to current events. And then we have control. We subscribe to the channels that we like, we can unsubscribe in one click. And today it is rare on networks to find such freedom, without having artificial intelligences which choose what we should see or not see.