Over the past 10 years, Wattpad has redefined story telling for millions of online writers and readers. Co-founder and CEO, Allen Lau, talks about the dramatic rise of a new source of stories & story tellers, transcending borders boundaries and language, and finding a sweet spot for brands and social media influencers.

Story-telling brand Wattpad deals in the “atomic unit of the entertainment industry – original stories that captivate audiences”. The platform, says co-founder and chief executive Allen Lau, deals “exclusively in the one thing that powers the entire industry: stories”. Over the past decade, the onlineplatform has built a 45-million strong global audience that spends 15 billion minutes a month reading and sharing 300 million uploads in about 50 languages. 90% oftraffic comes from mobile devices. When Wattpad was created 10 years ago, the focus was “to change the way people around the world experience stories,”

Lau says. Today, those storiesspan all screens, including movies and television series, and cover a range of formats, including gifs and video clips. All have built-in fan bases and are backed by free-flowing data that shows what’s resonating, and even the lines fans like most so scriptwriters can include them in movie or series adaptations. “Wattpad stories reflect what people love inlife, on the screen, and in the depths of their imaginations. As a result, Wattpad stories are always culturally relevant,” Lau says.

“This ultimately reduces the guesswork involved during the typical development process and ensures the success of these stories as they are brought to life across print, film, television and digital platforms,” he adds.

The migration to video is managed by Wattpad Studios, created this year to help the entertainment industry zero in on the stories with the most fans.

Wattpad Studios is headed by Aron Levitz, who works with head of partnerships, Ashleigh Gardner, to open up new relationships and manage the Wattpad Stars (the platform’s most successful writers and biggest influencers) programme. The Brand Solutions team is headed by Suzanne Spence, who works with brands such as Jollibee, General Electric, AT&T, Mondelez and Universal Pictures to promote their brands using, among other assets, Wattpad Stars.

Lau says divisions like Wattpad Studios “represent the future of entertainment. They create a link between the online world of user-generated content and the offline entertainment world”.

Describing Wattpad Studios as “a natural progression for us as a company”, he says the initiative “will lay the foundation for us to become an entertainment company that bridges the gap between old and new media.”

Tried-and-tested partners include the Philippines’ free-TV broadcaster TV5, which premiered the Wattpad Presents prime-time series in 2014. The series is now in its fifth season. TV5 has produced 200 episodes representing 40 Wattpad stories.

Around the world, stories such as The Kissing Booth have been optioned for film. Paramount Pictures is currently working on the screenplay for After by Wattpad star Anna Todd, whose Wattpad series has become a bestselling book translated into 32 languages.

Wattpad writers have recently been given a multimedia option to create graphic novels, travel diaries and fashion blogs. Storytellers can also insert media into existing stories to create a more immersive experience. Every day, storytellers add more than 100,000 videos, images and gifs, to their stories on Wattpad, Lau says.

Multimedia launch partners include Sony Pictures, Coca-Cola, DC Comic’s Vertigo imprint, and YouTube celebrity Grace Helbig.

One of Wattpad’s biggest challenges is building, evolving and maintaining the proprietary algorithms that comb through the 24 hours of reading material posted to Wattpad every minute to find the best stories.

“We believe the future of television (and entertainment on a whole) will be driven by communities of storytellers and backed by powerful data and insights, Lau says.

An increasing number of stories on Wattpad are from Asia. “We see great international growth across the world,” Lau says. A new user joins Wattpad every second of the day. In the Philippines, people shared over eight million uploads last month. “We’re seeing that amazing growth spread to regions like Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia. Last month alone over two million uploads were shared in Southeast Asia,” he adds.

Clearly, the notion that young people don’t read anymore is wrong. “The majority of the Wattpad community is under the age of 30. Young people want to be entertained and they want to participate and that’s why Wattpad’s mobile, serial and social experience works for this demographic,” Lau says.

Wattpadders aren’t only going for new stories. The platform maintains a Classics section, with writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens. Pride and Prejudice, for instance, has been read five million times on Wattpad.

“The success of Pride and Prejudice on Wattpad is in part due to the power of influencers on Wattpad. In Anna Todd’s story, After, she mentions the work along with other classics. Her fans then flockedto the classics, also available on Wattpad,” Lau says.

Apart from being a big reader, Lau has another reason for loyalty to classic works. “In the early days of Wattpad, some of the first stories we uploaded were public domain works from Project Gutenberg. These classic stories helped us attract the first members of a community that would grow to an audience of over 45 million people monthly. Forthat reason I’ll always be found of the classics”.

Published on ContentAsia's print issue three 2016