Wattpad
Description
Allen Lau was sitting in the Vancouver airport in 2006 looking at Ivan Yuen’s laptop screen and saw the same idea he had been building in his own basement in Toronto. Both men had been attempting to solve the same problem on their own, how to get long-form reading content onto mobile phones. Lau had been prototyping a mobile reader for three years, going back to 2002 when he first tried loading text onto a Nokia handset that could display five lines at a time. The screen was too small and the infrastructure too primitive to proceed with it, so he put the project down. By 2006, the phones were good enough to return to the idea. Yuen had gone further — he had added a web interface in which anyone could upload anything, and then read it on a phone. Lau flew to Vancouver two days after seeing the prototype. Wattpad began in that airport.
They launched the platform out of a garage in Toronto on November 10, 2006. The timing looked difficult: smartphones were not mainstream, Apple had not yet announced the iPhone, the idea of ordinary people uploading long form content for strangers to read was not normalized. YouTube had only launched the year before, and was still finding its audience. Lau and Yuen knew that mobile reading and user-generated content were trends in motion even if the infrastructure to support them at scale had not arrived.
Wattpad is a social storytelling site where writers post original fiction in serialised chapters and readers follow, comment and vote on the stories they like. The platform holds over 665 million story uploads in genres such as romance, teen fiction, fantasy, fan fiction, and horror. As of 2023, Wattpad has about 94 million monthly active users, with most of them being women aged between 18 and 34. Stories gaining sufficient reads and engagement have drawn publishing contracts, film options, and television adaptations, making Wattpad a place of discovery for commercial entertainment in addition to a community of readers and writers.
HISTORY
Growth was slow during the first two years. Lau later described spending an evening in 2008 or 2009 walking through the social graph of the platform — following the connections between writers and readers — and finding he could not reach the end of it. That was when he realized the magnitude of what had been built. The comments he saw during that exploration told the same story: readers writing to say a story had changed their life, writers responding that having readers had changed theirs.
Wattpad raised three and a half million dollars in 2011, the same year it reached one million users. A $15 million Series B came next from New Enterprise Associates in 2012. By 2014, more than 25 million people were spending upwards of six billion minutes per month on the platform, and the company raised $46 million in a Series C led by OMERS Ventures. The platform achieved its first milestone of major cultural crossover when Beth Reekles’ The Kissing Booth, published beginning in 2010 at age 15, garnered millions of reads, was offered a publishing deal with Delacorte Press in 2012 and eventually became a three-film Netflix series from 2018 to 2021. Anna Todd’s After series, fan fiction written about One Direction and uploaded beginning in 2013, was a huge success with over one billion reads, a five-book publishing deal with Gallery Books in 2014, and a film franchise starting in 2019.
Those two examples changed the way publishers and studios perceived Wattpad. The platform had proved that a story could create a proven audience before anyone in the traditional industry had assessed it. Wattpad institutionalized that observation in January 2019 with the launch of Wattpad Books, a publishing imprint that used machine learning to identify stories with commercial potential based on reading data from Wattpad’s platform. The algorithms analyzed engagement metrics — reads per chapter, completion rates, reader comments, votes — to surface stories that human editorial instinct alone might have missed. Wattpad Studios took care of the parallel track of selling stories to film and television producers.
Naver Corporation, the South Korean internet company that runs the WEBTOON comics platform and the Naver search engine, announced its acquisition of Wattpad in January 2021. The deal closed in May 2021 at about $600 million in cash and stock at an overall deal value of $754 million. The acquisition merged the written fiction community of Wattpad with the comics audience of WEBTOON, giving it a total global reach of over 166 million monthly users. Allen Lau left the helm after the acquisition but stayed on as executive advisor. Wattpad continued to operate independently from Toronto under its current leadership.
Covid-19 caused a sharp rise in engagement during the 2020 lockdowns. Lau said readership and new story uploads surged by 30 to 100 percent during the weeks that countries went into lockdown as people turned to reading and writing as both entertainment and creative outlet during long periods spent at home.
KEY FEATURES
Uploading a Story and Serialized Publishing
Writers publish stories in chapters so that readers can follow along with the writer as they publish new parts of the story. The serialized format establishes a continuing relationship between writers and their audience — readers respond to chapters as they are published, and writers often acknowledge the feedback, answer questions or alter the direction of the story based on reader responses. There is no formal publishing process, editorial gatekeeping or submission queue. Any registered user can publish instantly. The lack of barriers implies that work of all quality levels is hosted on the platform, which explains the importance of the reading algorithm in identifying content that is worth finding.
Community Interaction
Readers interact with stories, via inline comments — comments attached to specific lines within a chapter — and via an overall comments section. The vote system allows readers to mark stories that they liked and vote totals are publicly displayed on each story profile and used to influence how the recommendation algorithm surfaces content to other users. Writers and readers are able to follow each other, and follower counts work in much the same way as social media following relationships. Direct messaging between users supports conversations outside of story comments threads.
Reading Lists and Discovery
Users organize saved stories in reading lists — private or public collections that serve as playlists for fiction. Reading lists can be shared with followers and are displayed on the user’s profile. The discovery system brings stories to the surface via trending lists based on genre, hot lists updated regularly based on recent engagement, and algorithmic recommendations based on a user’s reading history. Genre tags and story descriptions aid new readers in discovering content that fits certain preferences.
Wattpad Premium
The subscription tier eliminates advertisements from the reading experience, allows offline downloads of stories to read without an internet connection, and provides access to advanced analytics for writers to show how their stories are performing — reads by chapter, retention rates of readers, and follower growth over time. Premium does not limit access to content or introduce paywalled stories; its benefits are applied to the reading and writing experience around public free content.
Wattpad Originals and Coin System
Wattpad Originals is a program where selected stories release chapter by chapter with some unlocked by Coins — in-app currency purchased using real money. The program was a replacement for an earlier model called Paid Stories, which ran from 2019 and distributed more than one million dollars to participating authors by 2021. Originals held to the principle that stories should have free access alongside optional paid chapter unlocks so that casual readers could follow stories for free while providing a monetization mechanism for the writers involved.
After Dark
After Dark is a stand-alone Wattpad app for adult romance content, which requires age verification to use. The app is limited to the romance genre with adult-oriented content that the main Wattpad platform hosts under content rating labels but separates in the After Dark context. It was launched in February 2015 as part of Wattpad’s move into genre-specific applications.
Multilingual Support
Wattpad has a worldwide user base and stories are written in dozens of languages. Filipino writers and readers are one of the most active communities on the platform, with several Philippine television networks and publishers adapting Wattpad stories into local productions. The platform has had partnerships with publishers in the Philippines in particular to find and publish locally popular stories for print runs, with Summit Media’s Pop Fiction imprint formalizing that relationship in 2014.
FUTURE DIRECTION
The acquisition by Naver tied Wattpad’s future to a larger strategy around intellectual property discovery and cross media entertainment. WEBTOON and Wattpad together represent two formats of fan-created and original serialized narrative — comics and text fiction — reaching a combined audience that neither platform could claim independently. The data infrastructure that underlies both platforms, analyzing reader engagement in order to determine commercially viable stories before traditional gatekeepers can, puts the combined company in the position of being an upstream supplier to the publishing, film, and television industries. Wattpad has verified that around 1,500 stories from the platform have made their way into books, film or television production in one form or another, a pipeline that continues to grow as the site’s global audience expands.
