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

Known for freewheeling fanfic, the self-publishing platform is turning into a content factory

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........

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