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The BBC, the weekly-in-chief-series-profiles of various executives from all over The World . This Week , we talk with Allen Lau, co-founder and chief executive of the global storytelling website and app Wattpad.

In the early days of his company, All Lau had a favorite pastime-evening.

He would lurk on the online storytelling community, he had developed, together with co-founder Ivan Yuen , in search of new authors.

All would regularly discover 10, maybe 20, many of the writers he had never seen before who shared their original work on Wattpad.

Then, one evening: "I just click, and it will never be finished. I kept bumping into new people," says the 51-year-old.

it's Not only new authors in droves to the platform, but the Fans were interacting with their favorite authors. All knew that something had clicked - a storytelling community was Born .

since 2006, Wattpad now has More Than 80 million readers and four million active authors on the Website every month.

It is a global platform, with the support of More Than $117m (£88m) from international investors in Asia, the USA and Canada.

With Wattpad, the sources of income, ranging from in-story-ads, a paid premium version, and brand-and sponsored content, tech site Crunchbase estimates that The Company 's annual turnover is now More Than $24m.

From the beginning, All of you, and Ivan, 42, had high hopes, but Wattpad story is not an overnight Success .

Hong Kong-Born All moved to Canada in the late 1980s at the age of 19 years. He studied Electrical Engineering and was hired by Microsoft, a job that was The Right fit for the young University graduate with an itch for entrepreneurship.

He left the work in a Canadian software start-up he experienced, "rocket ship" of about 100 employees to More Than 700 in about three years, before it was bought by an American company. For All, it is an educational experience about the possibilities of Success .

Ivan interfere, also an engineer, was one of The First to rent in Allen 's first start-up, a mobile gaming company based in Toronto. Ivan later moved to Vancouver, but the pair kept in contact. One Day Ivan sent you All a message, she wants to show him a project he was tinkering with, a website where users could write parts of the original one.

All, the both of them has read the love of the two and electronic devices, was already working on something similar, a way for people to read on the then-popular Motorola Razr phone.

"It doesn't take long to decide for us," let's do this together'," says Allen . The name they took a turn to the term e-book, with "watt" for electricity in combination with "pad", where people write down ideas.

That was the end of 2006, the year Google's video-sharing site YouTube for $1 bought. 65bn.

All, remembers thinking: "If YouTube 40 million users can generate From Zero in a year, maybe, we could generate a few million. But in the end it was only about 1,000. Clearly, it didn't work. "

she had launched the platform with thousands of public-domain books, to pull out classics such as Pride and prejudice, as content reading devices. It was not the draw they hoped for. Your Google-ad-revenue in the year 2007 was a modest $2. In a word, The First results were "depressing".

But The Stars aligned for Wattpad with Apple 's release of the iPhone, and the subsequent launch of the App Store in 2008. Mobile text went so Well readable, user-friendly almost overnight.

"If I had a crystal ball I probably would have started The Company a year later, as we have," says Allen . "But The Good news is, it is always better to be early than late. "

It was truths two years of Wattpad launch that a user of an original work published on The Site - a Victorian vampire novel called Blind. Within 18 months after The First , had to overcome The Company , what we have All " the "chicken and egg" - problem: "no content, no readers.

Additional features:

"Without a reader, no-one uploading of content would. So we had the snow ball rolling. But as soon as the snow rolls a ball, he just rolled faster and faster. "

the platform reach and the community were a major attraction. Can the Creator interact directly with Fans and build an audience. And support for multiple languages, from Vietnamese, Filipino, helped attract international users.

in 2011, The Company had one million registered users, and The Audience has continued to grow. In the years since, some of the Wattpad-authors massive advertising have reached, if not always critical, Success .

American Anna Todd 's After was a literary phenomenon with her novel, written on your smartphone and released, Chapter by Chapter.

It has now been read by More Than 600 million Wattpad users, while the subsequent series has a total of 1. 5 billion, reads the Date - and The First -time author scored a publishing deal. A subsequent film adaptation was released in April 2019, and won a "People's Choice Award in November.

Meanwhile, Beth Reekles , a British 17-year-old, had an incredible Success with their rom-com novel, " The Kissing Booth. It was later published by Penguin Random House, and adapted for Netflix, always of 2018, according to the streaming giant.

Wattpad now has the cooperation with companies in North America , Europe, South-East Asia and Latin were also in the wider entertainment space, to bring America, the platform's most popular works to televisions and screens. It has also saved his own print-publishing-launched.

Says it All: "if you have a million users, there are 100 ways to make money, if you have 100 million users, there are about 10,000 ways to make money. "

discover new trends and discover which of the half a billion uploads, that have been made to the platform's best-sellers and blockbusters, Wattpad audience uses data and algorithms, Artificial Intelligence , deconstruct the information, as granules, as a sentence.

The Company estimates thousands of writers, such as Ms Todd and Ms Reekles, money on the platform. Wattpad has to monetize the different options for authors to your output, including a recently launched program that allows the reader to pay directly, select authors for their work.

in Addition, top authors the opportunity to work on branded content, with companies such as Coca-Cola and H& M Wattpad is interested mainly thousand-year Reich and the Generation Z users. Then there is the possibility of a writer, may Todd the platform next to Anna .

Lorraine Shanley, a publishing-industry consultant: "the publishers are intrigued by Wattpad and impressed by what you have done".

"Wattpad offers authors several ways of monetizing your own work, so it looks like they take their Fans , it looks it is a advertise, and the support of the Fans . This is a balancing act and you have done it very Well . "

All says that Wattpad writers have Success , is "very emotional". "We have demonstrated that we have to do things in a traditional way, we don't have to be a gatekeeper," he says.

"We democratise The Process . At the end we give much of The Power back to the Fans . "

Source of news: bbc.com