Sthasy Guerrero

Wattpad is an online platform that is used by those who are fond of reading and also allows them to also publish their own stories.

According to editor Calvin Reid, Wattpad was “founded in 2006 by Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen as an online community of writers and readers.” Furthermore, according to crunchbase, Wattpad has “2,402,629 monthly app downloads.”

According to John Hunt Publishing, “It is estimated 50% of Wattpad users are under the age of eighteen, and the stories that break out into the mainstream tend to be stories aimed at teens and young people.” The site also states that “The most popular genres are romance, young adult/teen, and fanfiction.”

As someone who was a frequent Wattpad user, my own experience is that many users are teenage girls. The platform does not exclude anybody, but it could be fairly said that a lot of the books found on Wattpad target a female audience. The majority of the books on Wattpad cater to teenage girls; much of the content is romance or fanfiction.

I was a freshman in high school when I discovered Wattpad and I had a tremendous amount of free time in my hands. At the time I was into boybands like 5 Seconds of Summer and One Direction and I wanted to know more about these bands and their members; like any other teenage girl, I stumbled into fanfiction and its realm of it. I have also come to see that a lot of romance stories follow the same cliche trope, of the bully falling for the “nerd,” or the popular guy falling for the shy girl, or the bad boy falling for the good girl, etc.

I eventually found out that a lot of the stories do not focus on quality, rather on capturing the attention of a particular kind of reader. When I wrote my first story on Wattpad, I did not try to perfect it or think about whether it was a typical romance story that many others have read already, but it found an audience, nonetheless.

As a teen girl, I only cared about the feeling I got from reading stories on Wattpad. As an adult, I can reread my stories and cringe at everything wrong about them, but as a teenager I was blind to it.

Makayla Sophia, an editor who also used to publish stories on Wattpad, states: “Wattpad has successfully broken barriers for writers who felt their amazing stories wouldn’t fit elsewhere. They have given a platform to so many amazing people to share their stories and connect with readers who love their content.”

The importance of Wattpad lies in its community–that young people are able to get a head start in writing and find an audience no matter what type of story they’re publishing. There is an adrenaline rush in publishing these stories and getting the attention and support.  So, Wattpad remains impactful for some, especially someone like me who is now an English major and trying to make a life of writing.

Despite it all, Wattpad was a starter for me and it remains as a special aspect in my life because of how it expanded my yearning for writing and getting into all kinds of writing later on. No matter how the stories are written or how cliché they may be, Wattpad still served as a form of entertainment for me and formulated what now is my passion for writing.