As Wattpad Takes a Corporate Turn, Users Miss Its Cringe Years

Alex Simpson (Unsplash) / Emery Forbes

The summer after high school stretched out endlessly for Brandon Wong. In 2015, the future University of Alberta commerce student found himself with a common post-school problem: too much free time. An avid reader, Wong was scrolling through the App Store one afternoon when a writing app recommendation caught his attention: Wattpad, a bright orange app promising millions of free stories.

Wong quickly became hooked. Unlike traditional books, Wattpad’s self-published (often smutty) fiction unfolded in serial form, with chapters ending on cliffhangers and dropping one at a time like sitcom episodes. Readers crowded the comments section, dissecting plot twists, swooning over love interests, and wildly speculating about what would happen next. Wong recalls feeling addicted to Claudia Tan’s Perfect Addiction, a revenge-fuelled romance about a mixed martial arts trainer whose boyfriend cheats on her with her sister (the webnovel has since racked up more than 86 million reads). The genres themselves ran the gamut: One Direction fanfiction, werewolf romances, billionaire love stories, and every unhinged trope in between. “It’s almost like a concert experience,” Wong says. “I get to see everybody else reacting and losing their mind at the same time.”

By fall, Wong had graduated from reader to writer. He’d never written fiction before, but Wattpad’s anything-goes atmosphere made it feel worth a shot. He started posting a romance about a cocky hockey player and his goody-two-shoes honour student love interest. Over the next year, Playing by the Rules became a breakout hit. It won a Watty Award (the platform’s annual competition for emerging writers), amassed more than 10 million reads, earned Wong quarterly ad-revenue payouts ranging from the low hundreds of dollars to as much as $1,000 in a strong quarter and is now being eyed for a potential screen adaptation.

Wong represents the dream Wattpad likes to sell: that a story posted online can attract millions of readers and eventually leap into publishing or film. Most users, however, create for little or no financial return. Wong is what Wattpad’s leaders would today call an “IP owner.” His journey from fan and reader to creator—and now a potential Hollywood property—is the result of Wattpad’s own double-decade evolution.

What began as a freewheeling corner of the internet where fans and amateur writers shared stories for the love of it gradually transformed into a sophisticated content pipeline, converting fandom into intellectual property with “built-in audiences.” In Wattpad’s early days, participation was the point. Users wrote for fellow fans, traded feedback, flooded each other’s inboxes, and collectively built the cultures that made the platform feel alive. Fans described it as a “massive dorm room buzzing with ideas, fan theories, and unhinged creativity.”

Ahead of its twentieth birthday this fall, Wattpad bears little resemblance to the grassroots fan forum it once was, having transformed into a global entertainment powerhouse. Stories from the platform regularly secure publishing deals, land on bestseller lists, and inspire film and television adaptations. Today, the platform counts roughly 145 million monthly users and 26 million creators worldwide, with its predominantly Gen Z, female audience spending more than fifty minutes a day on the app.

Yet the very systems that make the entertainment ecosystem possible—algorithms, monetization, content moderation, and promotional pipelines—have also reshaped the original ethos of the platform.

In Wattpad’s evolved, data-driven approach, the algorithm reigns supreme over what gave it cultural cache in the first place: the power of connection, unapologetic creativity, and fandom. Recommendation engines, engagement metrics, and commercialization pathways now determine which stories rise to the top and which writers get selected for revenue-sharing programs.

In building a business of and around fan creativity, Wattpad has created new opportunities for writers—while erecting a new set of gates around who gets discovered, promoted, and paid.

Hailed as “the orange app that raised a generation,” Wattpad was founded in 2006 by Toronto tech entrepreneurs Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen. Its rise coincided with a period of upheaval across fandom spaces. As early-aughts platforms like LiveJournal faded, FanFiction.net faced criticism over content purges and censorship, and Tumblr cracked down on adult content in the 2010s, fans began searching for new homes online. Wattpad emerged as one such refuge. According to Xianwei Wu, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studies East Asian media and digital culture, the platform offered a more accessible alternative to many existing fandom communities: it was free, easy to navigate, and simple to join.

Wattpad also served as a queer-friendly haven, a gateway to stories from around the world, and a gathering place for niche fandoms that struggled to find acceptance elsewhere. “Many younger fans would sometimes feel very isolated in their real lives because they might like a really niche indie band, or they may worship some celebrity that they feel embarrassed to talk about to their real-life friends who might make fun of them,” says Wu. “So they found those communities that were much more tolerant on the internet, where people were already interested in the same things that you are.”

For many users, Wattpad served as a hidden parallel port that opened up in their bedrooms. Readers hid phones inside textbooks, stayed up past midnight waiting for chapter updates, and forged friendships with strangers who understood their (Harry Styles) obsessions. In a recent love letter to Wattpad published in Elle India, one former user recalled how the platform’s stories shaped “our humour, tropes and the way we understood relationships.” They also somehow convinced an entire generation to read “300,000 words in two days because we had to know if the girl would finally break the mafia prince’s emotional walls.”

Nearly a decade after its launch, the fan forum began showing signs of commercialization. In 2015, Wattpad launched the Stars Program, an invite-only arrangement offering standout writers access to brand deals, sponsored storytelling projects, and industry connections. After winning his Watty, Wong was one of the writers invited into the program, where he produced sponsored content for campaigns with companies including National Geographic and AT&T, helping drive engagement while gaining coveted promotion on Wattpad’s homepage. The arrangement offered him and other writers a first glimpse of what it might mean to monetize their fandom-fuelled success.

It was also a preview of Wattpad’s broader ambitions. In a 2016 press release titled The Master Plan, then–chief executive officer Allen Lau envisioned Wattpad as a “global, multiplatform entertainment company” that could mine audience behaviour for insights, identify future hits before traditional gatekeepers, and turn user-generated stories into a pipeline of monetizable intellectual property.

Launched the same year, Wattpad Studios was designed to adapt popular Wattpad stories for print, screen, and digital platforms, further cementing the company’s role not just as a storytelling platform but as a talent scout and IP broker. While writers retain copyright to the stories they publish on Wattpad, the company increasingly positioned itself as an intermediary connecting promising authors with publishers, studios, and brands. Over the years, it has helped broker hundreds of publishing deals for writers discovered on the platform, typically taking a commission similar to that charged by a literary agent. The arrangement allowed Wattpad to profit from the small fraction of authors who broke through, even as millions of others continued to write, build audiences, and generate engagement on the platform without compensation.

For Wattpad, the flywheel strategy quickly produced proof-of-concept successes. By 2014, Anna Todd’s After—a One Direction spin-off where a tattooed bad boy fixates over a naive college freshman—had already landed a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster after attracting hundreds of millions of reads on the platform. Wattpad reportedly took an estimated 15 percent commission on Todd’s book earnings—roughly what a traditional literary agent would charge—and later served as a producer on the After film adaptation, a successful five-part franchise on Netflix. Similar success followed with Beth Reekles’s The Kissing Booth, which went from Wattpad sensation to a blockbuster Netflix trilogy starring a then-little-known Jacob Elordi. The franchise helped catapult the Australian actor into one of Hollywood’s most recognizable young stars. Together, the series demonstrated how Wattpad could shepherd stories from fanfiction and self-publishing into mainstream entertainment.

Then, in 2017, came Wattpad Premium, where users could pay $5.99 (US) a month or $59.99 a year to access popular paid stories uninterrupted by ads (current rates for Premium+ are $4.99 to $7.50 a month). Reddit threads about the “ruin of Wattpad” began to surface. Fans began looking at AO3 as a safer space, getting nostalgic about the early days of Wattpad where there were “no ads, no profit by the writers, just people looking to post.”

Soon after came Wattpad Books, the company’s direct publishing imprint. It was powered by “Story DNA,” a machine-learning system designed to sift through millions of stories, comments, and reading patterns in search of the next breakout hit. But while the platform’s users generated the data that made such analysis possible, the tool itself remained inaccessible to them.

Vass Bednar is the Canadian Shield Institute managing director and a public policy expert who frequently contributes to The Walrus. She studied Wattpad as part of a federal government research project on data and cultural platforms and argues that Story DNA may function less as a tool for writers than as a talent-scouting engine for Wattpad itself. By analyzing the stories, reading habits, and engagement patterns generated on the platform, Wattpad can technically identify commercially promising creators and turn user-generated content into intellectual property opportunities that serve its broader business goals. “Effectively, it’s this platform creating something valuable for itself based on ingesting the material that is voluntarily created and posted under the guise of being a social reading platform,” Bednar told The Walrus.

The company knows where readers are located, who is reading what, and how stories perform—information that could help writers better understand and grow their audiences. Instead, she says, that knowledge remains concentrated within the platform, creating an information asymmetry that ultimately advantages Wattpad over the creators who generate its value.

In 2021, South Korean internet company Naver acquired Wattpad. The move was meant to align the app with the Naver brand Webtoon, a platform for vertically scrolling webcomics. Webtoon’s creator economy has drawn criticism from some artists who say the platform’s contractually mandated weekly publishing schedule encourages overwork, with some creators reporting sixty-plus-hour work weeks to meet release deadlines.

Then president Jeanne Lam identified creator monetization as one of the company’s top priorities, positioning Wattpad as part of a broader ecosystem where user-generated stories could be transformed into paying audiences and valuable intellectual property. By 2025, paid content had become Webtoon Entertainment’s largest business segment, alongside growth in IP adaptations and advertising.

Yet, as in traditional publishing, only a very small percentage of authors ever achieve meaningful success on the platform. While a small fraction of writers earn money through ad-revenue sharing, sponsored content partnerships, or publishing deals brokered by Wattpad, the overwhelming majority continue creating for little or no financial return. Earnings can vary dramatically: some successful Paid Stories authors have reportedly earned tens of thousands of dollars, while writers in less popular genres say they’ve struggled to generate any meaningful sales.

As Wattpad evolved from a community platform into a content business, critics say homogenous and heteronormative genres and tropes increasingly rose to the top, while the weird, niche, and experimental corners of fandom became less visible. Xianwei Wu points to the record-breaking success of the After series as proof of the growing appetite for heterosexual romance on the app. “When I think back to the platform’s earlier years, there were a lot more queer stories being featured. Fandom was very queer to begin with,” Wu says.

Reflecting on her own time as a Wattpad user, Wu remembers a platform overflowing with self-insert One Direction fantasies: What if One Direction adopted me? What if One Direction kidnapped me? “We don’t get the joy of reading those cringe teenage fantasies anymore,” she says, adding that creators are increasingly trying to write stories that will generate views or clicks.

In 2024, Wattpad removed its direct-messaging feature, citing low usage. Wong misses the message boards, forum discussions, and spontaneous interactions between readers and writers that made Wattpad feel like a social network for storytellers. As the company has increasingly focused on identifying marketable stories and turning them into books, films, and other intellectual property, “the trade-off,” Wong says, “is that there’s less of that community aspect.”

Perhaps its biggest blow is yet to play out—the threat of generative artificial intelligence and, what publishing consultant Mark Leslie terms, “digital slush.” A platform built on fast-moving, trope-heavy fiction seems especially vulnerable to an influx of AI-generated stories designed to mimic the formulas readers already reward.

Wattpad and Webtoon’s parent company, Naver, unveiled its homegrown large language model to compete with OpenAI and Google’s systems. And the company’s leadership sees the technology with rose-tinted glasses. In an interview with The Walrus, Webtoon’s chief financial officer, David J. Lee, said Wattpad sees “AI as a tool that can support creativity, not replace it.” Lee—who comes from a lineage of scaling consumer technology brands, like Best Buy, Impossible Foods, and Zynga—added that there are “practical ways AI can help writers, particularly with research, outlining, organization, or editing.”

Reports of readers stumbling across AI-smelling stories are already live. Readers are already pushing back. Across Reddit, complaints about “AI slop” have become increasingly common, with users describing stories that read as if they were generated by ChatGPT: repetitive blurbs, inconsistent character names, and plots that feel eerily formulaic. Some express frustration that AI-written stories can rack up likes and visibility while human authors spend months crafting work that struggles to find an audience.

For Wu, the backlash reflects a deeper anxiety about what fandom is meant to be. “Fans are very hostile to AI-generated things,” she says. The concern is not just literary quality but trust. Fandoms are built on the assumption that another human being is on the other side of the screen—writing, commenting, obsessing, and creating alongside you. As AI-generated stories proliferate, Wu worries that Wattpad risks becoming a “circle jerk” in which human creativity is mined for data, transformed into algorithmic output, and then fed back to readers as content. In response, some fan communities have begun developing their own informal rules around AI use, policing and stigmatizing undisclosed AI-generated work in an effort to preserve the social fabric that made fandom spaces feel authentic in the first place.

Will Wattpad’s tech-centric future be based on AI ghostwriters generating and refining stories at scale? Or will it, as Bednar suggests, use reader data to reverse-engineer the next blockbuster? Ask Lee, and the twenty-year-old app remains “the ultimate data-driven engine for Hollywood and publishing, transforming passionate, built-in fandoms into undeniable, global hits.”

Yet as generative AI floods the internet with diluted, unoriginal fiction, the qualities that once made Wattpad distinctive—human creativity, niche communities, and passionate fandoms—may become more valuable than ever.

This story originally appeared in The Walrus.