Who Owns Wattpad?

Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen founded Wattpad in Toronto in 2006, launching it as a mobile reading platform years before smartphones made such platforms ubiquitous. The pair met through a Vancouver technology company and conceived Wattpad as a way to share and read serialized fiction on phones, anticipating the creator economy before the term existed.

Growth was slow at first but compounded steadily. The platform found its audience among young readers and amateur writers who posted serialized stories chapter by chapter and built direct relationships with readers through comments. By the early 2010s Wattpad had tens of millions of monthly users, and its demographic skewed young and female, an audience that mainstream publishing largely ignored.

The platform's commercial breakthrough came through its ability to surface hits. Stories that performed well on Wattpad were picked up for traditional publishing and screen adaptation. Anna Todd's After, posted on Wattpad, became a bestselling book series and a multi-film franchise. Other Wattpad-originated properties followed into film and television, and the company formalized the pipeline through Wattpad Studios and publishing partnerships.

Naver's $600 million acquisition in May 2021 was one of the largest deals ever for a Canadian technology company at the time. The strategic logic paired Wattpad's western audience and webnovel expertise with Naver's dominant webcomic platforms. The June 2024 Nasdaq IPO of WEBTOON Entertainment brought Wattpad under the listed structure alongside WEBTOON, LINE Manga, and eBookJapan. Fiscal 2025 saw WEBTOON Entertainment take significant goodwill impairments connected to Wattpad's valuation, a reflection of slower growth than the acquisition price anticipated.