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

A Profile of Wattpad, A Profile of Us!

The 24% are a mix of readers and writers. But a majority of that will be readers, because writers are also readers.

The rest of the 76% are likely readers. Yes, you got that right. Wattpad now has more readers than writers. The demographic has changed significantly over the last two years!

This makes a lot of sense because of the 1% rule:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Simply stated, there will always be more content consumers than content generators. Content generators (you and I) will always be in the minority! That's wonderful news if you think about it. Now, here's a question that's begging to be asked: Why the heck don't I have reads then? 

Well, to understand that, we need to get into another principle, the Pareto Principle or the 80-20 rule. Put in context, 80% of the readers on this website will gravitate toward 20% of the content on Wattpad. If you're not in the top 20% of stories on this website, you're getting ignored, simply because. Now I'm not saying you won't get readers. You'll certainly get a handful, but to really reach critical mass, you've got to get into the top 20%. Even better, get into the top 1%! Sometime last year, I received an email from Wattpad that said that my book Kuro was in the top .01% most read books of 2013! It's a great feeling! :D

If you're wondering what I'm talking about regarding critical mass and would like to hear more, please go back and re-read my article "Much Ado About Reads Part 1". Also watch out for Part 2 ;)

Male vs Female

We all know this to a certain extent, but Alexa.com confirms it for us: Wattpad's audience is overwhelmingly female! Males are under-represented, and females are over-represented. What gives guys? Read some more?

Education

Wattpad's audience as far as education is very diverse. People who haven't gone to college (It looks like teens and high schoolers are lumped into the category as well) and people who are still in college are over-represented on the website. This makes perfect sense! Those are the folks with a lot of free time on their hands! :D College-educated indexes normal compared to the population, so there is a normal presence of College Educated people on Wattpad when compared to the real world. People with graduate degrees (Ph.Ds, MBAs, and MS degree holders, a group which I belong to), are under-represented. This makes sense. For those types of people, time is very limited and to be able to create content on a regular basis requires personal sacrifice and dedication.

Browsing Location

This one's surprising. Let's take a look. There is a normal distribution of those who visit from home. That is to be expected. People who visit from work are also under-represented (good for you guys!). What is surprising is that there is a high amount of traffic from School. Traffic from school is over-represented on this website (bad kids! bad kids!).

Mobile vs Web

I've mentioned this before, but Wattpad's audience is overwhelmingly mobile. 33.6 million of Wattpad's US traffic comes from a mobile device. A mere 2.4 million comes from the web. So, only 6.7% of the visitors are visiting from a computer! Since it is harder to create stories from a mobile device, that lends even more credence to the theory that there are certainly more readers than writers on Wattpad! Unfortunately, Quantcast does not share stats on Wattpad's global audience. But you can take the US audience and extrapolate that out to the global audience. In fact, I would suspect the global audience would index higher for mobile device usage. In many countries, Smart Phones far exceed computer ownership. This is very exciting because look how many potential readers we've got!

Catching the Wave

I saved the best for last: Wattpad's traffic by day. Why is this valuable to us? Because it tells us when we should be updating our stories!  Take a look at the Multimedia portion of this story on the right. You'll see a distribution of the traffic on Wattpad.

If you look, traffic is flattest on Mondays and Tuesdays. The lone exception is the Monday after the Watty winners was announced, so we can exclude that as an outlier. Wednesday picks up steam, and Friday is the beginning of the big wave that culminates in Sunday. 

Remember what I said about updating Wednesdays and Fridays? Here's physical proof of why that works! By updating Wednesdays, you can pick up a few readers and is a good opportunity to "rank up". But updating on Fridays ensures you get to "ride the full wave". Remember, when we update, Wattpad gives priority to our stories for a good 4 - 5 days. Updating on Friday allows us to get "priority" on the days that matter - when Wattpad's traffic is at its highest.

At this time, I am currently testing a new theory. If it works, I'll post it on here for everyone's benefit.

Note that this chart does not include "Day-parting" or what times of day work best. Do not update on a Saturday morning in North America. Trust me on that one, LOL!

Anyway, that's all for now!