Wattpad: A Library In Your Pocket
Steve Jobs once famously said, “No-one reads anymore”.
However, Wattpad’s astonishing success story gives us a completely different picture than what Steve Jobs had envisaged:
- Five million times a month, someone comments on a Wattpad story
- 15 million times, someone has uploaded a story or a book to Wattpad
- And those 15 million monthly unique visitors spend a massive average of 30 minutes per session reading
Wattpad has emerged as the largest community for sharing and reading stories online. Allen Lau, Founder and CEO of Wattpad, calls it a “library in your pocket”.
His vision:
“What YouTube is for video, Pinterest is for images, Twitter is for news, and Tumblr is for blogs, Wattpad is going to be for stories”.
So far so good. But, has the company got a monetization model?
Not yet, “We are still in userbase building phase,” Lau said. “Once we have that critical mass we can start monetization. 15 million is a number I should be proud of, but we are only still only one percent of where we want to be.”
How Wattpad will grow to the size of a Facebook or a Twitter?
It has already attracted hundreds of millions of users. And “Wattpad will get there by doing more of what it has done to date: via indie authors and, increasingly, branded books and name-brand authors”.
