Publishers Find Traffic With An Unlikely Source
Messaging app WhatsApp is emerging as an unlikely source of organic referral traffic at a time when publishers are struggling to drive audiences to their sites amid a period of deprioritization of links—and in some cases news—on some social media platforms.
“With WhatsApp, it’s as easy as seeing a chart from Yahoo Finance and then forwarding it to a group or a person that you’re talking to on WhatsApp,” Michael Kelley, head of distribution at Yahoo Finance, told AMO. “There’s a very natural network effect there. We don’t have a paid promotion or anything. We don’t bring any other audience development tools.
We let the content and the network’s effects do their work.”
Meta’s Publisher Push
WhatsApp came into its own for media publications in 2023 when it released channels, a one-way tool that allows companies to share content with an unlimited number of followers. Yahoo Finance started experimenting with the tool and gained an “early-mover advantage,” Kelley said. Yahoo Finance has 2.6 million followers on its WhatsApp channel.
The UK’s largest news publisher, Reach PLC, which is home to more than 100 local news brands as well as several UK tabloids, started experimenting with the tool in 2018.
“We knew it worked because, to be completely frank, every time we sent a big story, our real-time tracking would explode because people would get it and click it,” Dan Russell, engagement director at Reach PLC, told AMO. His team would manually type tens of thousands of phone numbers out and send news to people who opted into that service.
“It got to a point where we were breaking the technology, we were having phones overheat,” Russell said. “We were buying several phones for newsrooms and our scale got unattainable, really. So what happened over time was we canned it because it was almost like WhatsApp wasn’t ready for us.”
When WhatsApp launched new features that could handle the scale—communities in 2022 and channels in 2023—Reach jumped back in. It’s part of the publisher’s social media strategy of meeting the audience where they are, which is paying off as Reach celebrated the milestone of 100 million followers across all its social media channels at the start of this year.
Reaching International Audiences
What’s clear is that UK audiences can be found on WhatsApp. It’s the fourth most popular news source in the UK, with over a third of the public using it daily to stay informed on the news, according to a poll of 8,000 Britons conducted by public relations consultancy Charlesbye. Consumption of news on the platform is steady across generations, the consultancy said. Beyond news, it’s the most used social media platform in the UK, according to a 2025 report from creative agency We Are Social. Meta last disclosed WhatsApp usage numbers in 2020 reporting two billion people on the app worldwide.
WhatsApp’s communities, which are group chats with a capacity of up to 2,000 members, quickly became the social platform with the highest conversion rate for Reach, with open rates of between 80% to 90%, which means the vast majority of messages it sent were clicked on.
“We’ve got over 300,000 on communities,” Russell said. “On channels, we’ve got approaching three million people.”
Communities are very specialized groups which Reach spins up for specific topics, like an individual court case or for stops on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Those who sign up will read absolutely everything, Russell said.
The challenge with communities is they aren’t discoverable and they require promotion as well as more active moderation because of the size limit and opt-in nature of the groups. It’s a heavier uplift than channels, which are discoverable.
Yahoo Finance only leverages channels. The publisher has found that charts and data visualizations work better on WhatsApp than on Instagram.
“The first example of this is we put up a chart of the Mexican peso and this is something that wouldn’t really work super well on a place like Instagram, but we’re like, ‘let’s try it,’” Kelley said. “And it did really well on WhatsApp and it must have caught a jet stream of part of our audience who had shared it with their audience and those network effects.”
WhatsApp channels and communities drive between four to five million referrals a month to Reach’s websites, Russell said. Around 20% of them come from channels and the rest is communities, he said.
“[Are] communities more valuable than channels?” Russell said. “Maybe, in terms of referrals, but our communities wouldn’t be joined by football fans in Africa, for instance… they’re different products and they have their own advantages and disadvantages equally.”
Channels can reach a more international audience through WhatsApp’s discoverability feature. Football.london’s Arsenal channel has over 500,000 members and has unlocked new audiences for the publisher.
Breaking Into the U.S.?
Even though WhatsApp is predominantly associated with non-U.S. markets like India and the UK, both Russell and Kelley see opportunities for WhatsApp in the U.S.
“It is smaller in the U.S., but we can definitely see it growing,” Russell said. Many of the most popular media channels on Whatsapp are from U.S. publications like The New York Times, CNN and New York Post. Even B2B media companies are getting in on the action—earlier this month Astor Media launched a WhatsApp channel for Workplace Journal.
Reach already has channels linked to its U.S. media titles such as Express US’s The Bachelor and NASCAR channels, but has yet to launch any communities and is still waiting for the right time, Russell said.
WhatsApp ranks fourth in the top six social media and messaging networks for news in the UK, according to Reuters Institute’s 2024 digital news report. In the US, WhatsApp doesn’t even register within the top six, but Russell said that’s misleading because of the size of the country.
“A lower percentage in the U.S. can actually be quite a high overall number,” he said. “We definitely think there’s an opportunity in the U.S. where it’s just going to be a different opportunity and maybe done in a different way.”
