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Wattpad Raises $46 Million in New Funding

Wattpad wattpad_logolaunched phase 3 of their expansion plan today:

  1. Launch community
  2. Not be acquired by Amazon
  3. Profit!

The online reading community announced on Tuesday that they had raised a total of $46 million in a C Funding round. The round was led by OMERS Ventures and included all of the company’s existing investors as well as August Capital, Raine Ventures, and Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund.

Wattpad boasts that they have around 25 million monthly active users, or about 4 times as many users as when they secured their last funding round in mid-2012. Wattpad users now spend a cumulative total of over 6 billion minutes per month on the site. "To give some idea of how much content users are posting on Wattpad, they’re uploading one chapter every half a second," Lau told TechCrunch. "That’s about 150,000 uploads every day, and if you translate that to reading time, that’s about ten hours of reading uploaded to Wattpad every minute."

While that puts Wattpad far behind Youtube’s claim of 100 hours of video uploaded every minute, it is still an impressive accomplishment for a niche community.

Wattpad plans to use the funds to grow its user base, in particular the international membership. Wattpad has always had a strong international presence, and right now 50% of Wattpad’s activity comes from users outside North America. The social network plans to capitalize on that.

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Comments


Greg Strandberg April 9, 2014 um 12:19 pm

I cleared my browser cache a while ago and now need to look up my Wattpad password to get back on. I haven’t bothered.


Heather April 10, 2014 um 6:37 pm

Direct experience of Wattpad…

I do sense there are a lot of users there but I’ve been told by people that run it that only, like, ten percent are deemed serious writers.

So what is Wattpad’s agenda? Readers or writers? I wonder. They hype it as a writer community but..

I noted from moment to moment, a lot of NEW members, being hyped, say, with lots of initial views, on say, their first chapter, but it doesn’t always lead to users reading them to the end–I was a little surprised at that, as, I THOUGHT these high scorers, at first look, seemed like ringers, slowly being brought on board.

The website is somewhat organic and yet not. I keep wondering what their agenda is. If it’s not about paying writers, in the long run, and they seem to do a lot of advertising… I don’t know. My guess is it’s about acquiring capital to create a boffo reader space. NOT a writer space.

Lots of kids there. Lots of kids behaving badly–unlike just about any other creative or writing website I’ve ever been involved with. I’ve been on the web since about 1997.

Not sure what you cite with the word "profit" here. I’ve read articles of other capital being raised. What did you mean by profit?

The interface is splendid. But I’m truly a tad put off by the lack of…hm…something.

Thanks for the post.

Heather


Wattpad Acquires, Closes Competing Author Site | The Digital Reader August 17, 2016 um 6:50 pm

[…] put the $46 million raised in their latest round of funding to good use last week. PW reports that Wattpad has acquired a smaller rival writer site called Red […]


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