Cracking the Wattpad Code: Insider Secrets the Pros don't want you to know!

Monetizing Wattpad? Part 1

Hello ladies and gents!

I had some time to write again this sunday. I just got back from a jog from Independence Grove, which is a forest preserve with a large man-made lake within it. It's fun and you can jog for hours on end without getting tired because the water cools you down and the trees provide a steady shade. The temps were perfect this afternoon and life is good. :)

There's been a lot of buzz surrounding an experiment that Wattpad's conducting regarding monetization. It's begun allowing a certain author to sell bonus chapters of their work. A lot of people have been alarmed enough to prompt Wattpad to post their "Wattpad will always be free" post. To be honest, I think people are getting alarmed over nothing - every internet model that's out there has always had a free component. Spotify, Pandora, Youtube, Hulu. Even Netflix and Amazon with their premium content doesn't really cost that much. In other words, regardless of how Wattpad monetizes, you can be sure the consumer - readers AND writers alike - will come out ahead in the end. No sane Social Media website is going to go against the very thing that's made them popular to begin with.

With that said, I thought I would take this opportunity to share a few ideas I have around a few specific things: 1) How Wattpad can monetize and 2) How authors can potentially monetize and 3) What we can learn from Wattpad's growth model and how we can use the very thing that's made Wattpad so famous and apply it to our own books and perhaps generate a business model around it.

I recognize this chapter might not be as important to many of you who aren't looking to make any money of your work. I'm broadening the scope of this book just a tad to allow for other topics so it isn't always about algorithm, or reads, or community. Hope this doesn't turn off too many people!

Well, on with the show!

1) What Wattpad can do to Monetize

Let's do away with the obvious right off the bat: Ads, pre-rolls (displaying ads before each chapter), etc are all the obvious ones. But let's take this a step further.

Let's say Wattpad partners with a big publisher, say Simon and Schuster, and begin displaying ads to related books within Wattpad's books. For example, my book Kuro is a Science Fiction Fantasy novel. Well, every other chapter, an ad could pop-up to invite people to try an excerpt to "Game of Thrones". If they happen to like it, they could then go ahead and click out to the Kindle store and buy...

WAIT.

WAIT.

Why do they need to go out of of Wattpad to buy it?

What if, they just went ahead and BOUGHT IT right inside the app?

Wait a minute Mike, you're not suggesting that Wattpad go right after the giant of them all are you?

I am.

Which brings me to... 

Super crazy monetization idea #1: Wattpad versus Amazon!

Why is it so far-fetched? I don't have stats, but I'm going to guess the odds are pretty good that Wattpad will eventually outpace Amazon in the creation of content. True, the Kindle store releases an incredible amount of content, but even for self publishing, there is still a process that still has to occur for Kindle. It's still pretty darned easy, but the fact remains that the barrier to entry is higher. Not to mention the crazy long lead times for published novels.  

Now think about it, Wattpad now releases 1.5 million stories a month, and that pace is increasing as time goes by. If you thought it was easy to publish a story on Amazon, then compare that to Wattpad. I mean, ANYONE can do it right? That's certainly true. So Wattpad is going to get to a point where even Amazon won't be able to keep up with it.