One of the things I am most proud of about our portfolio at USV is that we have invested in a handful of companies that are slowly but surely changing the way content creators reach their audience and make money doing that. I like to think of it as the evolution of the studio model that has prevailed in content for as long as I’ve been alive. Some of the companies that would fit into this category are Kickstarter, SoundCloud, YouNow, Splice, VHX, Mediachain, and Wattpad.
Wattpad is one of the most interesting of the bunch. Wattpad is a community of readers and writers that operates natively on the web and mobile devices. It is, along with Kindle and Audible, one of the “big three” in the Books category on mobile phones.
Wattpad has a global monthly audience of 45mm people, mostly young and trending female, that read stories that are written on Wattpad for the community of readers that is there. That’s a big number. And that has gotten the attention of the film and television business. In 2014, Wattpad author Anna Todd’s serialized story After (over 1.3 billion reads and more than 6 million comments) was optioned by Paramount and is now being developed into a feature film (it has also been published as a book by Simon & Schuster).
So Wattpad has created Wattpad Studios to help other authors on Wattpad do the same thing. And yesterday Wattpad Studios announced a partnership with Turner to create stories for Turner’s Tales From The Crypt.
The global internet allows anyone to be a writer and anyone to be a reader. The stories that emerge from this community powered content creation and consumption model on Wattpad are rich and diverse. And so it makes a ton of sense that Wattpad would help these emerging storytellers reach a broader audience through the power of film and television. This should be a good service to the Wattpad writer community and a good business too.
