WhatsApp won't fix the traffic problem
And: The Times takes its subscription strategy further.
Good morning.
A couple big media stories ran late last week that I want to unpack. I’m going to cover one today and two later this week.
First, I need to issue an important correction.
In last week’s playlist post I completely whiffed on attributing the cover of Slade’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” to Twisted Sister instead of Quiet Riot. My college roommate rightly corrected me immediately on Thursday morning. That mistake was a bit of Napster-era brain rot. When you would download that cover of “Cum on Feel the Noize” on Napster back in the day, it would be incorrectly credited to Twisted Sister instead of Quiet Riot. And, yes, that has been embedded in my brain for over 20 years.
I deeply regret the error.
Let’s get to today’s newsletter.
Last week a story in the New York Times titled “Spurned by Social Media, Publishers Chase Readers on WhatsApp” was making the rounds.
When I saw this headline, I couldn’t keep my eyes from rolling. This is one of those pieces that come out every six months or so: a story about how media companies are looking for traffic because their main drivers of traffic for the past 10-15 years are slowly drying up and have find a solution in a new referral source.
Everyone is guilty of this. In the chase to diversify traffic sources, organizations jump from new referral option to new referral option: Apple News, Yahoo, MSN.com, Flipboard, SmartNews, Pocket, etc.
New aggregators pop up every so often with a promise of helping to diversify your traffic. So you spend time pitching stories for them to curate or feature and it starts off promising but slowly starts to dwindle.
Because once word gets out there’s some traffic to be had, everyone tries the same move. And in the end no new referral source is going to save you.
That’s how I’ve been feeling about WhatsApp for some time. There have been discussions about using traffic for WhatsApp for a couple years now. And as the Times piece covers, that’s been useful for some places—namely newsrooms.
I don’t work for a pure newsroom so WhatsApp hasn’t really interested me. I get that it's a place to build “community” but as I’ve covered before, community is a blur word that can mean so many different things.
What encouraged me about the Times piece was this bit:
“Swati Sharma, publisher and editor in chief of Vox.com, said Vox was trying to reach ‘non-news-obsessed’ and international audiences through its WhatsApp Channel, which has 482,000 followers. She said the outlet primarily viewed it as a way to build brand awareness and introduce new products, like podcasts and newsletters, rather than as a source of traffic.
“We are deliberately trying to have lengthy posts,” she said. ‘We think we can stand out by doing that. If people just stay in the app and are consuming our information, we think that’s great.’”
More thinking like that is great, because that is where the internet is going.
People talk about “scale” all the time. And “scale” is a blur word too. It can mean lots of different things. Audiences to most websites are getting smaller. But there are still millions of people visiting those websites each day. That’s a lot of people!
And the digital footprint of media brands across different surfaces are often still growing. It’s just you can’t monetize every surface in the way you want.
But if you think about new surfaces as ways to market your products and services and entertain people and engage them within the context of where they are spending their time instead of trying directly trying to drive them back to your website, you might get some high intent audiences to spend time on your product.
Now, if your website stinks (and most do) that’s going to be a problem, because people will leave and not come back. And if you don’t have anything worth subscribing to, then people may visit but never pay you.
WhatsApp could be a useful way to engage with people in a meaningful way—just like IG Broadcasts can be, or Substack’s Chat, or subscriber-only comments sections, or certain sub-Reddits.
For some newsrooms, spending time using WhatsApp to drive traffic may prove fruitful. But for most media outlets, expecting WhatsApp to drive traffic ain’t it.
One good quote
“The Times will partner with third parties to grow its subscription base off-platform where it makes sense, [Ben] Cotton said. Improvements to Apple's and Spotify's tools and technology made The Times ‘much more comfortable’ with launching third-party subscriptions for podcasts, he noted.”
This one is from Sara Fischer’s report in Axios that the New York Times will start putting its podcast library behind a paywall as of October 2024. I’m very interested to see if this works and if it does how many people will try to mimic this strategy. I call out this quote because I listen to a lot of podcasts and part of my job is also marketing a podcast. Podcast discoverability is rough and I hear a lot of podcasters complain about this. But when you are the New York Times at this point you may have some leverage to work with the podcast listening platforms to help your discoverability because people really find podcasts within listening services themselves–or word of mouth. The Times can take this approach because they’ve fully embraced a subscription model as core to what they do and plus they have a great internal marketing ecosystem among all their properties and surfaces.
More links
On the topic of traffic, NiemanLab broke down current distribution channel trends among publishers.
Max Read wrote about how we’re officially in the AI slop era of the internet. Good stuff as always.
Brian Morrissey talked with Adam White of Front Office Sports. If you like hearing about the mechanics of building a media brand (and you KNOW that I do) this is a good listen.
TikTok is simultaneously handling United States congressional hearings and coming for Google’s advertising business while Google is defending itself in an antitrust case brought by the United States government. What a world. Basically TikTok is starting to offer targeted advertising on its search results pages.
Wired appears to be doing well under Katie Drummond’s leadership.
And Vice is making a comeback with a subscription offer that includes print. As I wrote earlier this year, print is not back. There are plenty of good uses for a print product and this doesn’t strike me as one. NYLON made a splashy return to print but now their next print issue isn’t coming until 2025 and it's going to be on cheaper paper. BDG didn’t go bankrupt and they may slowly back away from print—Vice did go bankrupt. This doesn’t make sense.