WhatsApp said to plot a newsletter play

WhatsApp said to plot a newsletter play

Every day, I get around 36 newsletters in my email. Some are about new ideas that investors have for India and cryptocurrency markets, while others are just about news. With Substack, lots of journalists have started their own newsletters, so there are even more to read now. But it's getting harder to keep up with them all because there are so many emails to go through.

I was happy to learn that WhatsApp, an app that I use often, might soon have a way to read newsletters. A blog called WaBetaInfo discovered that WhatsApp is making a new tool for private newsletters. The tool isn't finished yet, but it should be part of a future update to the app. The website found this information by looking at the code in the app. The company that owns WhatsApp, called Meta, hasn't said anything about it yet.

WhatsApp has a feature where you can send messages to lots of people at once, which is really helpful for talking to multiple people at the same time. The new newsletter feature might build on this idea. According to WaBetaInfo, which is usually pretty good at predicting new features, the newsletter tool will let you send information to many people at once. It will be like broadcasting the information to a big group of people. It seems like the company that owns WhatsApp, called Meta, is also thinking about adding a similar feature to Messenger.

Assuming that WhatsApp goes ahead with the newsletter feature, what could it mean for the newsletter industry and for WhatsApp itself? WhatsApp is a really popular app with 2 billion daily users. Even if only a small percentage of these users become interested in newsletters (which most of them might not even know about yet), WhatsApp could quickly become the biggest player in the newsletter market. There are already people who use WhatsApp to share their newsletters with others. As more people start reading newsletters, the market for newsletters will likely grow, which could be good for the industry. This might not be the best news for existing newsletter platforms like Substack, but it's hard to say for sure.

WhatsApp could make newsletters better by letting users read them right in the app. This could make more people read newsletters and allow WhatsApp to offer more detailed information about how many people are reading them. It could also encourage people to spend more time using WhatsApp. As WhatsApp starts to focus more on business, adding newsletters could be a way to help brands and companies reach more people through the app.

Someone who works in the industry told me that many brands want to use WhatsApp because it has a lot of users and people engage with it more than other apps. But there aren't good tools to see who is reading brand messages or to track their success. Sometimes, even when people agree to get messages from a brand, the messages can still be marked as spam. WhatsApp could be a way for brands to reach more people than they could with email or other platforms.