The Grand Plan
By: Allen Lau, CEO and Co-Founder, Wattpad
2021 was truly a milestone year for Wattpad. We celebrated Wattpad’s 15th birthday and joined an incredible new family of brands with Naver and WEBTOON. As such, it’s a good time to reflect on The Master Plan and the progress we’ve made together.
As a reminder, I wrote the Master Plan in 2016 to coincide with Wattpad’s 10th birthday as a way to share my 10-year vision for the company.
I wish I had written something similar when Ivan and I started Wattpad in 2006. At the time, our plan was actually quite simple: We wanted to revolutionize how people discover, share, and connect through stories. Here’s how we initially did it:
We created a reading app for the RAZR and other feature phones using public domain classic books to attract our first group of users.
We leveraged the growing audience to attract our first group of writers who would share original stories on Wattpad. We created direct connections between these writers and readers around the world.
We started building the foundation for new ways writers could build fandoms and earn money from their work.
In many ways, we were ahead of our time, and we anticipated nascent megatrends like the global ubiquity of smartphones, the mobile internet, and the importance of user generated content in celebrating and elevating diverse voices all over the world. We had the first mover advantage and never looked back.
In 2016, after an incredible period of growth and achieving everything we initially set out to do, I unveiled Wattpad’s Master Plan. Similar to the original plan, it was remarkably simple, based on a few key areas of focus. I outlined how we would:
Discover more great stories (using Machine Learning technology we developed in-house)
Turn these stories into hit movies, TV shows, print books, and other media (through built-in fandoms and data-backed insights to massively increase the success rate)
Create new forms of entertainment
Distribute and monetize content on and off Wattpad, earning money for writers
Once again, we were able to leverage a new group of nascent megatrends like Machine Learning and the shift from linear TV to streaming. And once again we had the first mover advantage and never looked back.
Today, with the clarity of hindsight, I can say that most of our innovations over the years seem like no-brainers. But many of these decisions raised eyebrows at the time. A mobile reading app company that wants to make movies?
For an outsider, this might sound like a pivot. But at its core, Wattpad has always been more than reading and writing -- we’re an entertainment company. Our vision is to entertain and connect the world through stories. Since our inception, Wattpad has been an IP factory with built-in fandoms, along with all the data, analytics, and insight these stories generate. These insights are superpowers that have helped us understand stories--and what people love about them--at a scale that has never been possible before. By leveraging these unique superpowers, we just keep on expanding to adjacent spaces.
More than five years later, we’re past the halfway point of our original Master Plan. Since that original document was created, we’ve joined an incredible family of brands with Naver and WEBTOON, grown our global community to more than 94 million people around the world, and established Wattpad as the clear leader in webnovels.
While the four main themes of the original Master Plan remain unchanged, Wattpad has changed like never before. So now is the perfect time to look at what we’ve accomplished and share more about what’s next.
TLDR - we are once again on track to meet, if not exceed, everything we set out to achieve in 2016. That said, our job is not done, and we’re in a stronger position than ever before! With the wind at our back, we’ll continue to leverage new megatrends, such as the explosion of the creator economy and blockchain, to continue to grow, innovate, and remain a global leader in webnovels and storytelling technology.
Without giving it all away, here’s our updated plan.
#1 - Leverage machine learning to discover more great stories
In the past few years, we created Story DNA, our proprietary technology that leverages deep learning and big data analytics to generate insights from the world’s most diverse set of stories and its data. Our Story DNA technologies include machine learning models like our Quality Indexer (deconstruct stories into their elemental features through Natural Language Processing), Comparables Finder (finds stories similar to past hits), Emotions Identification (story arc, writing complexity and readability), Theme Identification, etc.
Increasingly, these insights help us identify great stories, storytellers, and even specific parts of a story that are most engaging for readers. Among the many uses of this technology, we’ve used Story DNA to find winning stories for the Watty Awards writing competition among hundreds of thousands of submissions.
But we’re just getting started, and today we’re only scratching the surface of possibilities for this technology. We must continue to explore how to leverage machine learning to benefit our business and our community. One example is to explore how AI could help our creators improve their writing and increase engagement by incorporating fan feedback into their stories. Or we could use it to surface even more undiscovered gems across a wider variety of genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery. One thing is for sure: it will take many years or even decades before we fully realize the potential of Wattpad’s Story DNA technology.
#2 - Revolutionize how traditional entertainment is produced
Five years ago, we launched Wattpad Studios and turned the old Hollywood model on its head. By leveraging our unique data and insights, we can predict which stories have the potential to become successful adaptations. We use fan reactions and engagement to help shape scripts.
Hollywood is a business making big bets based on gut instinct. Our approach means making better bets based on data. We’ve already proved to the entertainment industry that great content is only one half of the equation - connection matters just as much. Wattpad uses built-in fandoms and data to drastically increase the success rate of adaptations -- period.
Today, Wattpad WEBTOON Studios has more than 100 TV and film projects in development or production with partners on five continents and hits on screens from Jakarta to LA and everywhere in between. Looking ahead we will continue to upend the traditional model by using our unique data and insights, as well as our deep understanding of content and audience, to produce adaptations that fans love. We will support our creators as they make the leap into entertainment, publishing, and beyond.
With a $100M USD committed for development and production financing, Wattpad WEBTOON Studios is going to further accelerate the timeline to create hits on screens and bookshelves. Expect a growing success rate of data-driven hits from Wattpad WEBTOON Studios in the coming years.
#3 - Create new forms of entertainment
Joining NAVER and WEBTOON, the world’s largest digital comics platform, completely changed our trajectory. Together with WEBTOON, overnight we nearly doubled our potential audience and our combined capabilities, which now include webnovels, digital comics, print books and graphic novels, movies, TV shows, and animation.
Today, everyone is surrounded by powerful entertainment devices across all formats - video, audio, images, and of course, text. Emerging platforms such as the metaverse will create multiple opportunities for us. We will expand the Wattpad experience to other platforms to create new ways for the world to share stories and discover original entertainment. Imagine digital voice assistants like Alexa and Siri reading a Wattpad story to you while you cook, a dedicated podcast channel for Wattpad stories and related discussions, and tuning in to your favourite Wattpad story through your car’s entertainment system.
Importantly, this part of the Master Plan does not mean we focus on content only. Comments and other engagement features can be equally entertaining for the community and an area we will also focus on. Story comments are an integral part of the Wattpad experience, and like many of you, I find reader comments and reactions as entertaining as the story itself. We will continue to offer new and innovative ways to entertain (and connect) people around the world.
#4 - Distribute Wattpad stories across all formats, on multiple platforms, and earn money for writers
In 2018, we launched Paid Stories and subsequently Premium+, a subscription service that includes access to Paid Stories. In early 2019, we launched Wattpad Books, our publishing division. Today, we have a large and growing slate of books and international imprints for our top webnovels and digital comics from WEBTOON. These initiatives, combined with movies and TV shows, already provide multiple scalable opportunities to help creators to earn money. With the advent of NFTs/Web3 and other new technologies that cater to the creator economy, we will continue to find new and transformative ways for our creators to maximize the earning potential of their stories.
There will be multiple avenues for creators to earn from the stories and fandoms they’ve built on Wattpad. We will help them succeed by offering unique and meaningful opportunities writers won’t be able to find on any other platform. We’ll also create new ways for writers to build and connect with their audience. Since day one, Wattpad has created direct connections between writers and readers. In the future, we’ll offer new ways for these groups to engage with each other. Our goal is for Wattpad to be the platform of choice for all fiction writers and their readers.
With our technology, data, and community-driven approach to entertainment, we represent the future of the multi-billion dollar industry.
Leveraging the passionate global fandoms from Wattpad and WEBTOON’s combined audience of more than 166 million people, innovative storytelling technologies, and massive IP catalogue of proven IP with built-in fandoms, we are well on our way to achieving our vision is to entertain and connect the world through stories.
So, for our Next Chapter, we will continue to:
Discover more great stories through data
Turn these stories with built-in fandoms into great movies, TV shows, print books, etc.
Create new forms of entertainment
Distribute and monetize content on and off Wattpad, earn money for storytellers
Or, in short:
We find great stories
We build love for these stories
We help storytellers monetize that love in as many innovative ways as possible.
And we will achieve all these through data and built-in fandoms to take the guesswork out of the equation.
One more thing. If you read the original Master Plan you’ll know I alluded to building a Wattpad theme park. Although we are not there yet, we must continue to think big and contemplate what the Wattpad ecosystem will look like in the future. Who knows, as the metaverse expands maybe our theme park will be completely virtual making it easy for anyone, no matter where they are, to see, hear and feel the Wattpad experience.