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Wattpad is a website for reading and publishing originally written fiction and connecting with fellow writers and readers. Its most popular genres are romance, teen fiction, and fan fiction. As of November 2021, Wattpad had more than 90 million monthly users (the majority of whom were younger women), and there are over 665 million story uploads in total.
Some of its stories have been transformed into mainstream novels, TV series, and movies, such as the After and The Kissing Booth series. In January 2019, Wattpad launched its own Book publishing named Wattpad Books to ease the effort for its authors. In January 2021, Naver Corporation announced that it would be acquiring Wattpad, and the deal was completed in May 2021.
In April 2014, Wattpad announced $46M in a Series C of funding led by OMERS ventures. In January 2018, Wattpad announced $51M in funding from Tencent, BDC, Globe Telecom's Kickstart Ventures, Peterson Group, Canso, and existing investor Raine.
In March 2014, Wattpad partnered with Pop Fiction, an imprint of Summit Media, to market Filipino Wattpad stories. Other publishers from the Philippines also publish stories from Wattpad.
Since then, some Wattpad stories have also been adapted into Philippine drama. Filipino television network TV5, in partnership with Wattpad and Life is Beautiful Publishing Company, launched Wattpad Presents, a series of Wattpad stories turned into TV dramas. Wattpad stories aired on the show are usually those that were published by LIB Publishing.
ABS-CBN also made several adaptations of Wattpad stories such as "My App Boyfie" by Noreen Capili (noringai), starring James Reid and Nadine Lustre, and the coming-of-age series Bagito starring Nash Aguas, Alexa Ilacad, and Ella Cruz. Pop Fiction's best-selling book, She's Dating the Gangster, written by Bianca Bernardino (SGWannaB) as a Wattpad original, became the first Wattpad story adapted into a full-length motion picture starring Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla. The movie adaptation was produced by ABS-CBN's film production arm, Star Cinema. Liza Soberano and Enrique Gil also starred in the film Just The Way You Are, based on the Wattpad story "The Bet" by Ilurvbooks. "Chasing Red" was published by isabelleronin, a Filipino-Canadian writer who got more than 200 million views. In 2021, He's Into Her, a novel written by Maxinejiji (Maxine Lat Calibuso), will premiere on iWant TFC, starring Belle Mariano and Donny Pangilinan.
GMA Network has also started making adaptations of Wattpad stories via Luv Is, a series of stories turned into dramas similar to that of TV5 but the stories are longer.
On February 21, 2017, Wattpad launched a chat story app called Tap, which offers stories in the form of text messages as if reading a private conversation on someone else's phone. The app was an early success, with over 240 million taps in the first few weeks after the launch. On July 28, 2017, Tap launched "Tap Originals", a series of original stories produced by writers every week, with some of these series working on an episode-by-episode basis.
Later that same year on July 14, researchers at Risk Based Security discovered that a threat actor from an unknown source was responsible for the breach, along with the sourcing of over 278 million password credentials and email addresses, with breakdown analysis suggesting that Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook accounts were mostly affected. The Wattpad Corporation has since investigated and patched the issue.
Wattpad has stated that the feature has "only been relevant to a small percentage of our user base" and removing it could foster "transparent dialogue." However, proponents of retaining private messaging have stated that private messaging allows for collaboration among other things.
In 2018, nearly 300,000 writers from 35 countries take part in its yearly writing competition, The Watty Awards.
By crafting a spot for fanfiction alongside its other genres, Wattpad prioritizes its teen readers and gives the platform a twist. Deputy General Manager, Ashleigh Gardner, added the following about the genre: "What's unique about Wattpad is that fanfic is treated like any other genre, living alongside other forms of fiction. This makes it more fluid for readers of original fiction to discover a new fanfic, or inspire a fanfiction writer to start a new story and bring their audience along with them."
Fan fiction is the third-largest category on Wattpad, closely behind Romance and Teen Fiction, many of which are also fan fiction.
During the summer of 2012, Wattpad in collaboration with Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet/novelist/literary critic, held the "Wattys": the first major poetry contest offering a chance to poets on Wattpad to compete against each other in one of two categories, either as an "Enthusiast" or a "Competitor". It has been going on ever since, and now the contest is open to books of all genres.
Author Anna Todd, whose work After has received over a billion reads on the site, was given a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster to turn her online work into a multiple-book published saga. A film version starring Josephine Langford, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Selma Blair, Jennifer Beals, Peter Gallagher, and Shane Paul McGhie was released by Aviron Pictured on April 12, 2019.
The Wattpad Books acquisitions team uses a mix of machine learning algorithms and human editors. The acquisitions team looks to Wattpad's large and existing digital library (over half a billion titles) in order to select notable material for publication. According to Wattpad Books leader Ashleigh Gardner, this is in an effort to combat bias inherent in human editors. Gardner says that this technology analyses the data behind each title, looking at story structure and word use in addition to levels of reader engagement per title. This data is then compared to analyses of other books on Wattpad and in the public domain. Once all the data has been collected and engagement has been looked at, human staffers read the titles and create their lists.
All published titles are a combination of international hits and notable but known material from their digital library. These titles are distributed by Macmillan, Raincoast Books, and Penguin Random House in India and the United Kingdom, with their Fall 2019 list available in leading North American retailers. Outside North America, Gardner has sold the rights to Hachette Livre (France) for Deanna Cameron's What Happened Last Night. Additionally, Lauren Palphreyman's rights to Cupid's Match have been sold in French (Hachette) and German (S. Fischer Verlag).
Wattpad's first list consisted of six young adult novels. The QB Bad Boy & Me by Tay Marley (28.8 million reads) will be their lead title and was slated for release on August 13, 2019. The remaining five books will be released between September and October 2019 and include: Trapeze by Leigh Ansell (2.5 million reads), What Happened That Night by Deanna Cameron (over 1 million reads), Saving Everest by Sky Reads (17.2 million reads), Cupid's Match by Lauren Palphreyman (46.4 million reads), and I'm a Gay Wizard by V.S. Santoni (404,000 reads). Wattpad hopes to publish 18 titles in their 2020 list.
Besides Wattpad Books, Wattpad announced a partnership with Anvil Publishing, Inc., one of the Philippines' leading publishers, to create Bliss Books, a YA imprint with Filipino young adults and romance fanatics as their target market.
Since The Kissing Booth premiered on Netflix on May 11, 2018, Ted Sarandos called it "one of the most-watched movies in the country, and maybe in the world". The Kissing Booth was the fourth most popular movie in IMDb's popularity rankings in June 2018. Wattpad has also signed deals with Asian distribution partners, such as pan-Asian streaming platform Iflix to co-produce dozens of original movies based on Wattpad stories out of Indonesia, and Singapore's Mediacorp, to bring Wattpad stories to Mediacorp's FTA channels such as Channel 5 (with exception of CNA) and its streaming service Toggle.
On December 8, 2021, it was announced that ViacomCBS would be partnering with Wattpad to produce some of its original stories.
Wattpad, with AwesomenessTV, produces Hulu's popular Light as a Feather.
Wattpad, as well as similar online writing communities, help young authors build and construct their self-perception as writers, as well as establish an audience and interact with readers. It acts as a gateway into the publishing realm and offers hands-on experience with digital writing. This type of experience helps writers develop personal authorship.
Readers on Wattpad are able to comment on specific paragraphs and lines within the texts they read. Such comments are available to be viewed by all readers and the author themselves, acting as a form of feedback for the writer.
The Wattpad website notes, "We do not welcome upload of material that violates its copyright terms," but also states "It is simply not possible to screen and verify all posted content.". In response to industry criticism, in April 2009 (before the publication of the New York Times article that named Wattpad as a vehicle for user-generated e-book infringement) Wattpad announced an "Authors In Charge" program, designed to allow authors or their representatives to identify and directly remove infringing content from the site, but this program is designed specifically for "authors with published books for sale." Authors may begin their stories on Wattpad and then choose to publish their work. In most cases, the work on Wattpad is only a sample to ensure funds go to them in regard to their writing.
RoyalRoad hosts primarily LitRPG and isekai/portal fantasy novels, but also a wide range of other fiction.
Scribble Hub primarily hosts LitRPG, isekai, and xianxia, with a significant minority of transgender and other queer fiction.
Competitors and similar sites
Bookmate and the long-established and popular sites FanFiction.Net and Fiction Press (a spin-off site for original fiction) also serve as hubs for online prose. An alternative site that is free and open source is Archive of Our Own or AO3.
is named after a stylized romanization of . It is also a novel-centered social networking service about creative writing and illustrations founded in October 2017.
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