Wattpad Grows Storytelling Platform During Covid-19, Still Committed To Halifax Headquarters
HALIFAX – Last December the global storytelling platform Wattpad, which has launched successful book series and entertainment franchises, made a big splash with its announcement of a second headquarters to be established in Halifax. Ultimately it would be as big as the main headquarters in Toronto, where 190 of its 215 global employees are located. Then Covid-19 hit – but have no fear, Halifax’s story will have a happy ending.
The good news: the company has actually grown during the pandemic because people are hungry for content to consume at home. The bad news, which really is not bad in the long term, is while plans for Halifax’s headquarters have slowed down, it will still ultimately be as big as the Toronto headquarters.
Wattpad has set up its Halifax office at the Maritime Centre’s Volta innovation hub and has had an extremely positive experience thus far, with its first Halifax employee officially hired in March before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We do want to create close to 100 positions in the next few years,” said Wattpad co-founder and CEO Allen Lau, who adds the pace will depend on the post-Covid environment. “There might be some flexibility in there, maybe even quicker, maybe even slower. There are so many variables in the current environment.”
One thing is certain: the service is growing in popularity worldwide. Nearly one billion pieces of content have been uploaded to Wattpad since it was founded in 2006, and the platform has a total monthly audience of over 80 million people.
More than four million monthly writers publish their stories on Wattpad, which are available in over 50 languages.
The platform generates revenue via online advertisements, its subscription service Wattpad Premium, charging pay-the-the-chapter fees to access certain popular stories, adapting stories for film and television and publishing Wattpad’s stories and making them available in bookstores.
Anna Todd’s four-book young adult romance series After was published on Wattpad in 2014. It has since been released in over 30 languages and has sold 11-million copies sold worldwide. The first book was made into a movie in 2019 and made nearly $70-million worldwide. Its sequel, After We Collided, is in theatres now with the final two films in production.
Netflix phenomenon The Kissing Booth (2018) and its sequels began as a 2013 Wattpad story by Beth Reekles, and Hulu’s horror television series Light as a Feather (2018-), which has run for two seasons and received ten Daytime Emmy nominations, was published by Zoe Aarsen in 2013.
“As we continue to grow we do want to [cast] a much wider net to attract world-class talents. That’s when the second headquarters idea came up,” explained Lau.
Wattpad had several criteria when looking for the city that would house its second headquarters, equal to its full-sized Toronto headquarters. It had to have a vibrant tech scene, world-class creative and engineering talent, and a business-friendly environment with strong support from the government and local community.
“Halifax was a great choice because it pretty much checked all the checkboxes that we were looking for,” said Lau.
The company was also looking for a city where current employees would be willing to relocate.
“We have quite a few employees in Toronto that came from Halifax or have very strong ties in Halifax, including quite a few on our leadership team, like our head of marketing,” he said. “That’s how we got very excited about Halifax because [it] has a lot of internal champions within our Toronto office.”
The goal is for the second headquarters in Halifax to be equal to the one in Toronto and for both to have one homogeneous culture.
“That means we don’t segregate our engineering in Toronto or marketing in Halifax,” he said. “For the larger departments that have already have a critical mass and we do want to make it as equal as possible.”
While the pandemic has put plans hold and the company has mostly shifted to working digitally and remotely, Wattpad saw enormous online growth throughout the pandemic.
“Italy was the second country in the world that locked down and we instantly saw step function growth on our numbers,” said Lau, adding they saw similar projections in other countries as the global lockdown spread.
It turned out people around the world behaved the same when they are locked down – they consume content, they want to be entertained, with reading being a top activity.
“Reading time grew by 30-40 percent, the number of comments on our platform grew by 50 percent overnight, and the amount of content that got published doubled,” said Lau. “People still want to be social they just couldn’t get it in the physical world. That’s human nature, they still need that so people actually spend more time online and socializing online.”
Lau said the company is focused on continuing to grow the company, that taking Wattpad public is not an option they are spending time on right now.
“Working from home has served us really well and there’s no rush to go back. Safety is our number one priority,” he said. “We’re doing it one step at a time; I think Volta has given us a lot of flexibility because it’s a co-working space, we have a very ambitious growth plan.”