If you think that WhatsApp is merely a messaging solution, you are badly mistaken. WhatsApp is also a fast-growing and cutting-edge entertainment medium that could one day be as influential as television or newspapers.
WhatsApp has the potential to become a major force in entertainment for two reasons: First it can connect large numbers of people seamlessly and cheaply, and second it can be used to transmit a wide variety of entertainment. Currently, the app can be used to send video, audio, and written entertainment.
A good model of how WhatsApp could transform entertainment is WhatsApp Groups . These are networks of people that connect through WhatsApp, and many of them share entertaining material, including jokes. A visit to WhatsApp Groups reveals such groups as Best English Jokes, Funny Videos, Indian Films, Latest Arabic Jokes, Latest Movies, and News.
WhatsApp for Viral Entertainment
WhatsApp has the potential to become a powerful force in entertainment because material can spread virally over it. When something spreads virally, it spreads by word of mouth, which, as all experienced marketers know, is the most powerful form of advertising known to humanity.
Viral entertainment is so powerful because people tell each other about it. A person that thinks a particular joke is funny sends it to her friends who send it to their friends. Classic examples of viral entertainment include the hilarious cat videos that have become such a presence on YouTube.
WhatsApp Groups have the potential to become major entertainment hubs because they can connect hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. A person in India that thinks a video is funny can send it to friends in the United States or the United Kingdom.
This means entertainment can spread quickly without the need for massive advertising or promotion campaigns. People can create their own entertainment and disseminate it without the use of traditional media such as newspapers or television. They can also bypass the large corporations that often own or control those media.
Using such groups means a self-produced movie or television show could reach a large audience on a very small budget. A standup comic could reach hundreds of thousands of people rather than just a small audience in a comedy club.
Is WhatsApp the Future of Video?
There are those, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who think that video disseminated through social media such as WhatsApp will soon grow into a huge business. Zuckerberg, whose company owns WhatsApp, wants to develop a system that would share revenue between video producers and his company.
“We’ll give a revenue share on a portion of the views to content owners,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a conference call. The idea here is to let people that produce entertainment earn a profit by selling it through WhatsApp and Facebook.
This could be revolutionary and disruptive because it would enable creators to bypass traditional media outlets such as movie studios or television networks and sell programming directly to the public, CNBC reported . Think of the way companies like Netflix and Amazon have already become a major force in American entertainment.
WhatsApp could play a major role because it already reaches around 900 billion people around the world. It is a simple app that many people are already familiar with. If Facebook could figure out a way to sell streaming video through it, it could create the largest entertainment source of the 21st century.
How WhatsApp Could Entertain the World
An obvious way to expand WhatsApp’s reach would be to find a way to integrate it with a wide variety of devices; for example, a means of downloading WhatsApp videos onto your TV set through a solution similar to WhatsApp web.
This could be fairly easily done because WhatsApp is a cross-platform solution. That means it operates on a wide variety of devices and mediums. Since it is the largest and most popular such platform solution in the world, WhatsApp would be the natural candidate for creating a worldwide entertainment medium.
The most likely media to spread through it would be video. One place where WhatsApp would be popular is in developing countries like Tanzania, where many people have no access to traditional television or the Internet. Smartphones are their primary means of getting news and entertainment.
If Facebook could develop an entertainment platform just for WhatsApp, it could develop the first worldwide entertainment network. Just imagine the power of a video that could be seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world at once.
How to Find WhatsApp Entertainment
Strangely enough, one of the best ways to see the future of entertainment on WhatsApp is through a simple Google search for the words “WhatsApp” and “entertainment.” There is now a huge amount of entertainment content being produced for WhatsApp right now, much of it coming from India, where such material seems to be a growing industry.
WhatsApp Entertainment has become so popular in some places, including the United Kingdom, that some British newspapers are now covering WhatsApp material. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have a name yet, although I am sure that will change.
Other ways to find WhatsApp entertainment are to conduct searches for specific products such as “WhatsApp Jokes” and WhatsApp videos. The words funny WhatsApp videos will often produce hundreds of results, many of which are often more hilarious than what is on television.
A great way to get a lot of good WhatsApp entertainment is to join specific WhatsApp Groups that are devoted to it. For example, if you love cat videos, you could join a WhatsApp cat video group or organize one.
In the future, we’ll be likely to see a wider variety of WhatsApp entertainment, including games. One possibility is that there might be video games that are specifically created for WhatsApp. Another might be a continuing television series or a serial designed specifically for WhatsApp.
So it is entirely possible that the next big thing in entertainment, whether it is a must-see TV series or a song everyone wants to listen to, will come from WhatsApp. There might come a time when many people wonder how they lived without WhatsApp entertainment.