One of the sleeping giants in the world of self-publishing is the unassuming platform Wattpad. While the rest of the industry battles it out to be the biggest names with the flashiest systems and lure the most authors or books, Wattpad has quietly been amassing a user base of forty million registered users who actively engage in the site’s content and communities. How impressive is this engagement?
- More than 40 million people have joined Wattpad
- People spend 11 billion minutes a month on Wattpad
- Over 100 million uploads shared on the platform
- A user signs up on Wattpad every second
- More than 24 hours of reading material is posted every minute
“Probably our biggest story is how quickly we continue to grow,” explained Ashleigh Gardner, Head of Content at Wattpad, in an interview with Good e-Reader. “More than 100,000 people are joining Wattpad each day now, which is more than one user per second. Our average session length is thirty minutes, which is almost unheard of on the internet, that people are spending this time engaging in reading.”
This user engagement is two-fold, as a the site is the go-to location for writers who wish to post their content for others to enjoy, and as Wattpad continues to be a source of constant reading engagement for readers interested in following existing stories, discovering new content and new writers, and generally contributing to the climate of writer-reader relationships.
While Wattpad has been likened in the past to becoming the new “slush pile” due to the high number of stories and authors that have been picked up by traditional publishers and have even reached the top of the bestseller lists in several countries, one of the lesser known innovations is the amount of Wattpad content that has been adapted for film, including serialized television shows and feature-length films, particularly in foreign markets.
“Wattpad has been adapted to many languages,” continued Gardner, speaking of the users who have posted content in more than fifty different languages. “All we do is adapt the buttons and the language of the platform itself, and it’s our users who begin to share stories in that language.”
One of the most exciting new features that Wattpad recently introduced is its Writer Analytics Dashboard that provides an in-depth look at who is engaging with writers’ stories. The information includes:
- The number of unique readers by chapter
- The number of reader votes by chapter
- The number of reader comments by chapter
- How many reads each story part/chapter has (to understand points of reader dropoff)
- How many votes and comments each story part/chapter has
- Reader age, gender, and location
This type of data on writers’ work helps the authors in terms of knowing and connecting with their audiences, as well as providing them with an avenue to determine the course of further writing efforts.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.