Toronto's Wattpad wants to be the Pinterest of stories, according to the vision of founder and CEO Allen Lau. He
tells Venture Beat that Wattpad, the online e-reading platform that features work from indie and well-known writers alike, gets more monthly activity than popular platform Kindle. Last month's numbers included 15 million unique visitors, 1.5 million story uploads, and three billion user minutes spent on Wattpad.
The Ontario ministry of economic development
invited Venture Beat to Toronto this week to checkout the city's startup scene. Wattpad is at the top of their list, alongside
Hubba,
Fixmo,
Extreme Startups, the University of Waterloo, Google's Waterloo facility and about as many visits with venture capitalists and angel investors as the online tech publication can handle. But reporter John Koetsier, the VB representative visiting Toronto this week, says the reporting on Wattpad is his own.
Venture Beat praises Wattpad for its method, which to date does not include a monetization model; something Lau says is intentional.
"Where he wants to be is similar in size to a Facebook or a Twitter: hundreds of millions, or even billions. And how he plans to get there is by doing more of what Wattpad has done to date: via indie authors and, increasingly, branded books and name-brand authors," Koetsier writes.
Lau tells Koetsier that Wattpad has taken a very episodic approach to its platform to emulate the television format, presenting larger works in pieces over time. “Attention spans are getting shorter and short, so to make long-form writing work, we break it up," Lau says.
Koetsier will be reporting throughout his Toronto visit. Read his articles
here.
Original source: Venture Beat