TechCrunch April 8, 2014
Social writing platform and writer’s network Wattpad has been at it for a while now, and they’ve quietly amassed a massive user base that engages regularly with the site, posting their own stories and reading the stories of others, all the while engaging with one another through feedback, criticism and support. Now, the startup has raised a Series C round of funding worth $46 million, led by OMERS Ventures, and including August Capital, Raine Ventures and Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund, and all of the company’s existing investors.
Wattpad has around 25 million monthly active users on its network, according to CEO and founder Allen Lau, which is up from just six or seven million around the last time they raised funding, a $17.3 million Series B back in June 2012. Lau is maybe more excited by the site’s progress in terms of engagement, which they measure by time spent on site (a more reliable metric than some of the softer ones put forward by startups these days). Wattpad users spend a cumulative total of over 6 billion minutes per month on the network, Lau tells me, which is up from just 1 billion minutes per month on site in February 2012.
“To give some idea of how much content users are posting on Wattpad, they’re uploading one chapter every half a second,” Lau explained. “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.”