It’s the job of Aron Levitz, the head of Wattpad Studios, to lead the team that identifies the Wattpad stories that can make the transition to the screen. Its goal is to examine all these clues to uncover the precise combination of story elements-genre, emotion, grammar, the list goes on-that hooks audiences to the point they’ll follow its journey onto a visual medium. It also looks at how often users comment on stories and, when they do, what exactly they’re saying. The tool can break stories down to their vocabularies and sentence structures (a story’s “DNA,” if you will) and then compare those to other stories to deduce what really makes a work of fiction popular.
This provides content providers like Wattpad an opportunity to make their presence known to networks and streaming services that are looking for screen-ready stories to tell.
Apple and Amazon, meanwhile, are using entertainment as one more way to sell subscriptions to their other services. Disney, WarnerMedia, and ViacomCBS are converting their content behemoths into streaming-first enterprises and rapidly expanding the sheer amount of stuff they offer consumers.
WHAT IS WATTPAD STORIES TV
This month, the South Korean internet giant Naver bought Wattpad for $600 million.Īs streaming services compete not only with each other, but also with more traditional forms of entertainment like TV and film, new original content is at a premium.
WHAT IS WATTPAD STORIES MOVIE
Wattpad Studios, the platform’s in-house entertainment branch that launched four years ago, has nearly 100 TV and movie projects in active development, collaborating with companies like NBC and Sony Pictures. Many are also published as physical books by Wattpad.Īmong the dozens of Wattpad stories that became Hollywood successes are Netflix’s wildly popular The Kissing Booth film series, Hulu’s supernatural thriller Light as a Feather, and the indie film After, which was panned by critics but did well at the box office, earning $70 million on its $14 million budget.
(Wattpad makes money through advertisements, branded content, and a premium paid tier that offers additional features.) Some of these stories are then licensed out to Hollywood and other global film industries for adaptation, cutting the writers, who are often amateurs, in on the deal. Anyone can upload their own stories to the platform for other users to read and comment on, all for free. Wattpad, a “social storytelling platform” founded in 2006 with 90 million users, is gaining traction as a source of intellectual property for film and TV producers.