Wattpad Raises $46 Million in New Funding
Wattpad launched phase 3 of their expansion plan today:
- Launch community
- Not be acquired by Amazon
- 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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