Innovating To Help Writers Understand and Grow Their Audience

By: Jeanne Lam, President, Wattpad  

Wattpad is often thought of as primarily a reading platform. And we are! But at Wattpad, readers and writers are equally important for our community and business. Writers, with their world-changing stories, voices, and perspectives, are at the heart of the incredible community of 94 million people who come together on Wattpad from around the world.  

Helping writers build a global fandom for their work and make money is what drives us in everything we do. We’ve democratized who gets to tell their stories and started building a Creator Economy for authors. In fact, we recently announced our newest program to help authors make money and improve their craft with the Wattpad Creators Program. Today, some of the most exciting voices in fiction and webnovels are found on Wattpad, along with the global fandoms these authors have built and nurtured. 

As a storytelling technology platform, we combine art and science to enable authors to build their careers--or get their start--outside the traditional publishing system. Our storytelling technology has always served writers first and foremost, whether it’s pioneering the global webnovel market or creating new ways for writers to make money, share their voice, or understand their audience. 

Wattpad has one of the most engaged communities online: people spend more than 23 billion minutes a month on the platform, and the average engagement time is 60 minutes per user, per day. As a leader in storytelling technology, we’re able to analyze data from every part of that journey: we look at the different ways users interact with a story, including the number of reads, reading time, commenting insights, shares, and more. And we’ve shared much of this data with writers, helping them understand how their stories resonate with readers and allowing them to connect with their global fandoms in a meaningful way. 

As part of the Wattpad Creators Program, we’ve also recently introduced Engaged Readers, a new feature to help our writers learn more about how much time people spend with their stories. Engaged Readers are defined as unique readers who spent 5+ minutes reading a story in the last 365 days, giving writers a new way to understand and measure the depth of interest in a story. We hope this new metric will fill the gray space between sales and views for authors, the two main metrics that define how authors and the publishing industry understand a story’s performance with readers. While bookstores can tell you how many copies your novel has sold, there hasn’t been a way to measure how many people actually read that same book, let alone how many people have read the book in the last year. Engaged Readers gives authors a new dimension to understand their fandoms on Wattpad, telling them more about how many people are falling in love with their stories. 

Our legacy Reads metric isn’t going away. Authors will still have access to their total Read count, which will continue to help them understand their story’s growth and virality over time. But with Engaged Readers, they’ll now have access to insights that tell them more about the depth and recency of a story’s performance. 

Engaged Readers is currently rolling out to writers around the world. Writers will begin to see the new metric in the coming weeks, where it will join Total Reads (which captures all-time views of a story) and Unique Readers (which captures unique viewers of a writer's story over the last 30 days).

As webnovels continue to grow in popularity around the world, we are going to continue building new tools for writers to do their best work, grow their fandoms, and ultimately make more money from their stories. Engaged Readers is the next step in a number of new initiatives we’re planning for 2022 and beyond. We’re helping grow the global webnovel market alongside our authors, creating more opportunities for writers to grow their fandoms and monetize their work. 

Engaged Reads is our latest move to make Wattpad the best place in the world for writers to take control of their careers, whether they are outlining their first story or wrapping up their first trilogy.