In the era of smartphones, where distractions are only a tap away, it's become common practice to lament over the present and future of reading.
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Leisure reading in the U.S. is at all all-time low. In France, publishers' revenues saw an almost 5 percent decrease between 2017 and 2018. In the U.K., a 3 percent rise in digital sales in 2018 was more than offset by a 5 percent drop in physical sales. The future looks bleak.pic.twitter.com/AgQWZWLA1l
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Yet according to
@allenlau there's reason for hope: "Reports of the death of reading are grossly exaggerated. Reading just looks a lot different today."Prikaži ovu nit -
Wattpad is a social-first reading platform for serialized content. Readers come to the platform to discover, read, and comment on user-generated stories written in 50 languages and in every genre. Today 665 million stories generate 23 billion minutes of reading time every monthpic.twitter.com/RKhUZEUAMp
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Now
@wattpad is moving up the value chain as a publisher and producer in its own right, and selling traditional players on the value of community-driven content. It wants to build a new kind of IP factory, one powered by data, fandom, and constant feedbackPrikaži ovu nit -
The company has been growing steadily over the years. It now has 80 million readers worldwide, and a community of over 4 million writers
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Those readers and writers are what powers Wattpad's flywheel: more writers => more stories => more readers => more writers. There's also some serious overlap between the two communitiespic.twitter.com/ZwFFbTxpLA
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For writers,
@wattpad is a one-stop-shop. It allows them to dabble with writing, build and engage their audience, monetize their work, and move on to even bigger opportunities off the platform It brings them visibility, monetization, data, and educationPrikaži ovu nit -
Writers are Wattpad's enabler and lifeblood. They may be commoditized at first, but as they gain traction on the platform, more differentiated, more valuable relationships will formpic.twitter.com/da01oIwY6o
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That's because the company has closely aligned its incentives with those of writers: the more value and opportunities an author gets from Wattpad, the more value Wattpad gets to reap from that author's successpic.twitter.com/nKLL6pmdIa
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That "incentive alignment" model mitigates the risk that Wattpad's most successful, and most valuable authors will try their luck somewhere else: Wattpad is incentivized to help promising writers thrive with the best resources and opportunities
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In recent years the company has started catering to another audience: brands and IP owners Partnerships enable brands to harness the power of the crowd, and the work of star writers, to generate excitement around their product launches It's "branded literary content"pic.twitter.com/AMcYzMq91X
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Now Wattpad is looking way beyond its text-only beginnings.
@allenlau describes it as a "global multiplatform entertainment company for original stories" Focusing on intellectual property rather than text enables the company to capture value across all formatsPrikaži ovu nit -
With the help of user data, it's able to pick up early signals of success and engage with promising authors early on. Having early access to, and control over user-generated content means it can direct IP to the best avenues, be it publishing, TV, or film
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In effect, Wattpad is displacing Hollywood's and publishers' historical reliance on "gut feeling." It's relying on data and constant feedback to iterate on content with the help of its online community
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To do that at scale, the company has spread a wide net of local content partners that rely on its expertise and community to develop and produce fan-driven content It currently has deals with dozens of partners, each of them a force to be reckoned withpic.twitter.com/IEt3dPrkD0
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Those partnerships are also becoming more and more of a two-way street: At the same time that Wattpad is pushing its user-generated IP to publishing and production partners, it's attracting those same partners and their existing library to its platformpic.twitter.com/VdsG2Y3rfu
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All those operations are time- and resource-intensive, which raises the question of scalability. Indeed, slower execution may lead to operational bottlenecks It will be interesting to see how the company reconciles the product and service sides of things in the futurepic.twitter.com/RNd3qBvT4h
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Wattpad's feedback-driven model also raises questions that have to do with creativity itself. In his amazing essay on "The Commodification Problem",
@OshanJarow writes that digital markets "collapse the buffer between individual tastes and existing consumer preferences"Prikaži ovu nit -
How they do that is "by establishing immediate feedback loops between readers and writers." As Oshan notes, "This is great if you’re writing to reach consumers, but coercive if you’re writing to follow your own nose and explore untrodden potentialities."
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Over-reliance on feedback and iteration, rather than a final creative vision, leads to less risk on the creative side. And financial incentives to please their audience further constrain creators. We may be losing something when authors give in to financial and social pressure
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Why I think Wattpad is different however is because of how unapologetic it is about its offering. The company is clearly in the business of entertainment, not "Art." This implies a completely different creative paradigm, one that's open-ended and feedback-drivenpic.twitter.com/bgUJd4mV98
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Entertainment *is* commodified creativity. It exists not to make someone's legacy - although it might - but to be appreciated here and now by the audiences it can reach and please. Or, as
@ballmatthew says
https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1118675351696236544 …Prikaži ovu nit -
In his essay on "Status as a Service,"
@eugenewei cites Pinterest as an example of "path-dependent user composition. A fervent early adopter group can define who a new social network seems to be for, merely by flooding the service with content they love."Prikaži ovu nit -
Wattpad seems to still be on its own path-dependent track. People who join the service today will find that a majority of stories have to do with romance, werewolves, and high school drama, because that's what Wattpad's early adopters preferred to read and write.
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But that's already more than enough. Wattpad's success shows its content has already struck a chord. That it did so with a limited number of (often overlooked) categories is telling in itself: it didn't need to "cross the chasm" to be successful.
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In fact, the merit of its offering was that it was implicitly catering to communities that, until now, had been underserved and underrepresented.
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As Wattpad Studios'
@AronIsHere puts it: "Maybe you don’t know the rules of writing. Maybe you don’t know pacing. Maybe you don’t know how to set up a series. But you’re going to write something that you see missing."Prikaži ovu nit -
While Wattpad's spectrum of content may seem too narrow, it already offers plenty to work with. In fact, history has shown that successful IP can stem from exactly the genres that Wattpad writers and readers tend to favorhttps://twitter.com/allenlau/status/1197282010135506945 …
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