Acquisition by Naver

In January 2021, Wattpad announced that it would be acquired by South Korean conglomerate Naver Corporation in a $600 million cash-and-stock deal.^[21] In a press release, Wattpad reported that alongside Naver's webtoon platform Webtoon, the platforms had a "combined global monthly audience of more than 166 million people".^[22] In an interview, Lau stated: "It's also been very clear from Naver, and we agree, that we should operate as independently as possible."^[23] Wattpad remained headquartered in Canada and under its current leadership.^{[citation needed]}

Sister apps

In February 2015, Wattpad launched the standalone app After Dark.^[24] The app focuses on the romance genre and is intended for adult readers.

In February 2017, Wattpad launched a chat stories app called Tap,^[25][26] which has stories in the form of text messages as if reading a private conversation on someone else's phone. In the first few weeks after the launch, the company reported that 25,000 user-generated stories had been made.^[27] On July 28, 2017, Tap launched Tap Originals, a series of original stories with chapters released on a weekly basis.^[28]

Paid stories

In October 2018, Wattpad began Wattpad Next as a beta test. Wattpad Next featured stories that were to be paid for with coins, from which writers could earn money. The beta test concluded in April 2019, with Wattpad concluding that "Wattpadders are ready for a program that funds writers".^[1] The program, relaunched as Paid Stories, was initially available in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Mexico, and the Philippines. In May, it was expanded to Latin America and Spain, and in July it became worldwide with stories available in English and Spanish.^[1]

Wattpad Books

On January 24, 2019, Wattpad launched the publishing division Wattpad Books led by Wattpad Studios' Publishing Deputy Manager Ashleigh Gardner, with operations managed by Wattpad Studios' Publishing Director Deanna McFadden.^[29] According to CEO Allen Lau, this project was in an effort to take the "guesswork" out of publishing.^[30]

The Wattpad Books acquisitions team uses a mix of machine learning algorithms and human editors.^[31] The acquisitions team looks to Wattpad's large and existing digital library (over half a billion titles) in order to select notable material for publication.^[31][32] According to Wattpad Books leader Ashleigh Gardner, this is in an effort to combat bias inherent in human editors.^[31] Gardner says that this technology analyses the data behind each title, looking at story structure and word use in addition to levels of reader engagement per title.^[33] This data is then compared to analyses of other books on Wattpad and in the public domain.^[33] Once all the data has been collected and engagement has been looked at, human staffers read the titles and create their lists.^[33]

All published titles are a combination of international hits and notable but known material from their digital library.^[29] These titles are distributed by Macmillan, Raincoast Books, and Penguin Random House in India and the United Kingdom, with their Fall 2019 list available in leading North American retailers.^[29][12][34] Outside North America, Gardner has sold the rights to Hachette (France) for Deanna Cameron's What Happened Last Night.^[35] Additionally, Lauren Palphreyman's rights to Cupid's Match have been sold in French (Hachette) and German (S. Fischer Verlag).^[36]

Wattpad's first list consisted of six young adult novels.^[36] The QB Bad Boy & Me by Tay Marley (28.8 million reads) will be their lead title and was slated for release on August 13, 2019.^[36] The remaining five books will be released^{[needs update]} between September and October 2019 and include: Trapeze by Leigh Ansell (2.5 million reads), What Happened That Night by Deanna Cameron (over 1 million reads), Saving Everest by Sky Reads (17.2 million reads), Cupid's Match by Lauren Palphreyman (46.4 million reads), and I'm a Gay Wizard by V.S. Santoni (404,000 reads).^[36] Wattpad hopes to publish 18 titles in their 2020 list.^[36]

Besides Wattpad Books, Wattpad announced a partnership with Anvil Publishing, Inc., one of the Philippines' leading publishers, to create Bliss Books, a YA imprint with Filipino young adults and romance fanatics as their target market.^[37] In February 2007, Wattpad announced the addition of over 17,000 e-books from Project Gutenberg, making them available to mobile users.^[11]

Statistics

As of September 2020:

• More than 80% of its traffic and usage comes from mobile devices^[38]
• The site has 90 million monthly users^[39]
• There were over 665 million story uploads in total^{[11][failed verification]}
• 70% of users are female, 80% of whom are millennials or Gen Z^[10][40]

As of 2018, nearly 300,000 writers from 35 countries took part in Wattpad's yearly writing competition, The Watty Awards.^[41]

Publishing

Famous authors such as Margaret Atwood and R. L. Stine have also joined Wattpad. Atwood has posted poetry and judged a poetry contest on the platform.^[42] Stine has used Wattpad to post chapters of his books and has done interactive events with readers.^[43]

Wattpad has formed ties with publishing houses to try to help Wattpad authors receive compensation for their works. A new branch, Wattpad Studios, was developed to connect popular writers to both the publishing and film industries.^[44] Wattpad has, in the past, teamed up with publishing groups such as Sourcebooks to help Wattpad authors receive book deals and get their work into hard copies.^[45] More traditional publishing houses such as Random House and HarperCollins have approached popular Wattpad writers to negotiate publishing deals, allowing the website to serve as a springboard into the more traditional publishing industry.^[46]

Author Anna Todd, whose work After has received over a billion reads on the site, was given a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster to turn her online work into a multiple-book published saga. A film version starring Josephine Langford, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Selma Blair, Jennifer Beals, Peter Gallagher, and Shane Paul McGhie was released by Aviron Pictures on April 12, 2019.

Fan fiction

Wattpad has increased in popularity among many fandoms, who take to the platform to craft their own fan fiction.^[47] One of the most notable stories on the platform is the After series by Anna Todd, which was originally published as Harry Styles fan fiction.^[48] After its large popularity amongst the One Direction fandom and the app's readers, the story became the most-read book on Wattpad,^[49] having achieved just under 10 million unique readers on the platform and has been read more than one billion times.^[50] The series went on to be published by Gallery Books and became a New York Times Best Seller.^[49]

By crafting a spot for fanfiction alongside its other genres, Wattpad prioritizes its teen readers and gives the platform a twist.^[8] Deputy General Manager, Ashleigh Gardner, added the following about the genre: "What's unique about Wattpad is that fanfic is treated like any other genre, living alongside other forms of fiction. This makes it more fluid for readers of original fiction to discover a new fanfic, or inspire a fanfiction writer to start a new story and bring their audience along with them."^[51]

Fan fiction is the third-largest category on Wattpad, closely behind Romance and Teen Fiction, many of which are also fan fiction.^[8]

Contests

Wattpad hosts a number of writing contests each year, including the annual Watty Awards, the largest writing competition in the world.^[52] In 2011, The Watty Awards introduced three entry levels (Popular, On The Rise, and Undiscovered) to allow greater chances of winning for every type of writer. Contests are open to anyone who has a Wattpad account.

During the summer of 2012, Wattpad in collaboration with Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet/novelist/literary critic, held the "Wattys": the first major poetry contest offering a chance to poets on Wattpad to compete against each other in one of two categories, either as an "Enthusiast" or a "Competitor". It has been going on ever since, and now the contest is open to books of all genres.

Entertainment

Several stories published on Wattpad have been adapted to film and television, most of which are produced under Wattpad's in-house production company, Wattpad Webtoon Studios (formerly Wattpad Studios).^[53] In July 2025, the company rebranded as Webtoon Productions, taking the name of its sister platform Webtoon.^[54]

The first Wattpad-to-screen adaptation was the 2014 Philippine film Diary ng Panget, which is based on the novel of the same name published on the platform by Denny R. (under the pseudonym HaveYouSeenThisGirL).^[55] In March 2014, Wattpad partnered with Pop Fiction, an imprint of the Philippine publishing company Summit Media, to market stories by its writers in the Philippines.^[56] Since then, some Wattpad stories have also been adapted into Philippine television dramas or teleseryes. Philippine television network TV5, in partnership with Wattpad and Life is Beautiful Publishing Company, launched Wattpad Presents, an anthology series of TV dramas based on Wattpad stories from Filipino authors, most of which were published locally by LIB Publishing.^[57]

The first Hollywood adaptation of a Wattpad story was the 2018 Netflix film The Kissing Booth, which was based on the novel of the same name by Beth Reekles that originated as a story on the platform, where it won a Watty Award for "Most Popular Teen Fiction" in Wattpad's annual writing contest.^[58][59] It premiered on May 11, 2018, and was hailed as "one of the most-watched movies in the country, and maybe in the world" by co-CEO of Netflix, Ted Sarandos.^[60] The Kissing Booth was the fourth most popular movie in IMDb's popularity rankings in June 2018.^[61]

Wattpad has also signed deals with Asian distribution partners, including the pan-Asian streaming platform Iflix to co-produce dozens of original movies based on Wattpad stories from Indonesian authors,^[62] as well as the Singaporean public broadcaster Mediacorp to bring Wattpad stories to the broadcaster's free-to-air channels such as Channel 5 (with exception of CNA) and its streaming service mewatch (formerly Toggle).^[63]

On December 8, 2021, it was announced that ViacomCBS would be partnering with Wattpad to produce some of its original stories.^[64]. The first series produced under this partnership was the Hulu television series Light as a Feather, based on the book Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board by Zoe Aarsen and produced by ViacomCBS-owned company AwesomenessTV, which received ten Daytime Emmy Award nominations.^[65]

June 2020 data breach

In June 2020, Wattpad suffered a huge data breach that exposed almost 270 million records. The data was initially sold before being published on a public hacking forum where it was widely circulated. The incident exposed extensive personal information including names and usernames, email and IP addresses, genders of users, birth dates, and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes.^[88][89]

Later that same year on July 14, researchers at Risk Based Security discovered that a threat actor from an unknown source was responsible for the breach, along with the sourcing of over 278 million password credentials and email addresses, with breakdown analysis suggesting that Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook accounts were mostly affected.^[90] The Wattpad Corporation has since investigated and patched the issue.

Countries restricting access to Wattpad

Concerns over Generative Artificial Intelligence in writing

Wattpad users have expressed concerns over AI-generated stories on the platform, claiming the ability to produce content quickly is an unfair advantage. In a 2024 poll, Wattpad found that while 90% of readers and authors believe these technologies will play a role in the future of reading, more than 92% believe it is important that humans remain involved in writing and producing books.^[96] 43% of respondents had concerns over whether AI could limit economic or publishing opportunities and 23% were worried that AI would threaten cultural inclusivity and authenticity.^[97]

Copyright issues

Early in its history, some large volumes of user-uploaded material hosted on Wattpad were copyrighted material created by authors who did not grant republication rights. In May 2009, an article in The New York Times noted, "Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them".^[98]

The Wattpad website notes, "We do not welcome upload of material that violates its copyright terms," but also states "It is simply not possible to screen and verify all posted content."^[99] In response to industry criticism, in April 2009 (before the publication of the New York Times article that named Wattpad as a vehicle for user-generated e-book infringement) Wattpad announced an "Authors In Charge" program, designed to allow authors or their representatives to identify and directly remove infringing content from the site, but this program is designed specifically for "authors with published books for sale."^[99] Authors may begin their stories on Wattpad and then choose to publish their work. In most cases, the work on Wattpad is only a sample to ensure funds go to them in regard to their writing.