Wattpad Secures New Content Deal in South Korea

Over the last few years, Wattpad has made major strides to evolve from their beginnings as a storytelling medium to become a full-fledged entertainment powerhouse.

The latest move for the Toronto-based company is an expansion into the South Korean market through a new partnership with Huayi Brothers. The talent company is one of the largest in the country, and this new deal will secure the agency as Wattpad’s exclusive entertainment partner in the region.

“Wattpad’s model is the future of entertainment, using technology to find great storytellers and bring them to an international audience,” said, Jay Ji, CEO of Huayi Brothers Korea. “In an era of entertainment abundance, working with Wattpad means access to the most important things in the industry: a data-backed approach to development, and powerful, proven stories that audiences have already fall in love with.”

This is not the first deal of this kind for Wattpad. In fact, partnerships like this are becoming quite common. Wattpad is a major player in Southeast Asian entertainment, with the most recent deal being a partnership with iflix to develop 26 films in Indonesia.

Wattpad is able to use its vast platform to identify which stories will best be suited to become films, shows or other forms of entertainment. The platform collects huge amounts of data based on readership and engagement and can use that data to select stories that will be popular with certain crowds or viewers. Wattpad has over 70 million users, and those users spend over 22 billion minutes engaged with the platform each month. In total, there are more than 565 million stories written on Wattpad.

Just over a year ago, Wattpad raised a $51 million funding round led by Tencent, the massive Chinese conglomerate.