Rating: Network could prove powerful host for mobile ads
Harper Collins UK has announced the first book in the ‘Dark Heroine’ vampire series by Wattpad favourite – Abigail Gibbs. She has enjoyed 17,000,000 reads and 18,000 fans on Wattpad which is a mobile-first network for collaborative storytelling. Serving over ten million readers worldwide (with one million in the UK) Wattpad has become a social network to rival better-known social networking sites like Pinterest. Wattpad’s six million user-generated stories span every genre including mystery, romance, sci-fi, poetry and fan fiction. The content can be consumed on featurephones as well as smartphones and tablets. hence, 70 per cent of Wattpad usage is coming from mobile.The service can boast a whole range of statistics which illustrate how the network could become a powerful tool for mobile advertising. For example, two comments are now posted every second.
Each month, an impressive 2.5 billion minutes are spent on Wattpad and 750,000 new works are added. That’s up from a mere up from one billion back in February [2012].
Although Wattpad’s proving a useful outlet for working for amateur writers, established literary legends like Margaret Atwood and Paulo Coelho, and even celebrities like One Direction are using it too.
Wattpad was founded by mobile entrepreneurs Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen back in 2006. Allen first started prototyping a mobile eReading app back in 2002 on an old grey-scale Java phone that could only display 5 lines of text.
Recently, Wattpad secured $17.3-million from an investment group led by Khosla Ventures that includes Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.
It is also back by Union Square Ventures, which has provided money to start-ups like Foursquare, Tumblr, and Twitter.
The Wattpad Android app can be found on Google Play here and the iOS version is available via iTunes here.
