Q&A Allen Lau The Lau-down
Margaret Atwood is a fan, several of its community have recently inked deals with traditional publishers and Silicon Valley investors are piling in—Wattpad, the social network for writers, is on the rise. Co-founder Allen Lau talks to Tom Tivnan about his publishing ‘parallel universe’
Tell us about the growth of Wattpad—how you have achieved it? It’s been very similar to other social networks. Once you get to the somewhat critical mass, which we did about two and a half years ago, then the traffic shoots up like a rocket ship. Traffic was doubling every two months, but as the numbers continue to rise it is obviously harder to keep that rate of growth. So we’re looking to double current numbers in the next nine months. In the beginning it was difficult.
Our community depends on writers generating work, and people commenting on it, so if you don’t have enough content, you can’t drive enough users. And if you don’t have the users, you don’t have the content. A very classic chicken and egg story.
What’s your business model, how exactly do you make money? Right now we are advertising supported. On our mobile apps, it’s through banner ads. Tat’s working well; digital advertising is, of course, inexpensive compared to print, but we do have the volume to drive revenue. But, it is fair to say the focus of the company is on user growth and we’re paying less attention to monetisation. We believe there may be other revenue streams down the road.
Why are you attracting so much investment? If we look at media businesses in general, they are all shifting from the way consumers consume content. Fast-forward 20 to 30 years you will only see CDs and DVDs in museums. Te book is also going through that evolution. I’ll use the encyclopedia as an example. First you had the Encyclopedia Britannica, then you had
YouTube, that’s how he was discovered. But even though he is now very successful, he didn’t “graduate” from YouTube, he’s still very much active on it, perhaps more so than ever. Nowadays, internet native writers
won’t graduate form Wattpad per se, but continue to be active there because that’s how they interact with their fans. It’s a direct connection. After users read a chapter they can interact with the author right away. You can’t do that elsewhere, even on other self- publishing platforms. Tis is a new type of entertainment, almost cross-media, and traditional publishing is one component of that.
WATTPAD FACTS
l 10 million unique monthly users l Four million members l 70%: percentage of members
the first digitalisation: Microsoft Encarta. But that was really only an “e” version of the Encyclopedia Britannica; there may have been video, but how it was created and consumed was much the same. But then Wikipedia came out, which is an internet native version of the encyclopedia, from the content creation to the editing to the consumption. Wattpad is the internet native
version of the book. Te market is not yet there, obviously. Te company is in this relatively early stage, but
16 THE BOOKSELLER DAILY AT FRANKFURT | 10 OCTOBER 2012
who are women l 66%: Wattpad traffic from mobile apps
fast forward 10 years and I would assume the way that content is created, edited and consumed, and how the readers and writers interact, will be very, very different than today.
Several Wattpad writers have “graduated” to traditional publishers. Is that good for Wattpad? I wouldn’t say they graduated to traditional publishers. I see us [and traditional publishers] as parallel universes, which can coexist. Look at Justin Bieber. He started on
What do you think about traditional publishers—will they be able to adapt? Some publishers will be able to move with the times, some won’t. Let’s take an example from another medium: music labels. If they exist, labels are much smaller than they were before, but the labels continuing to make money are the ones that are digital natives. Te consumption habits of consumers are changing rapidly and publishers have to adapt to that. It’s not a choice. If you only focus on print, or see
digital as only part of print, you will have a hard time surviving. Tose who are able to adapt and become a digital native publisher will survive. Te problem is that it’s still early days, and I don’t think anyone really knows what exactly a digital native publisher will be. Tat said, I think the role of traditional publishers as a whole is going to shrink—it’s inevitable.
Allen Lau founded Toronto-based Wattpad in 2006 with Ivan Yuen.
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