Filipinos among top users of world's largest ebook community

MANILA, Philippines - Filipinos are the second biggest users of the world's biggest online reading and storytelling platform Wattpad, according to latest data from social media monitor SocialBakers.

Seven million Filipinos visit Wattpad every month, coming second behind Americans and ahead of users from United Kingdom, Vietnam, Canada, Australia, Turkey, India, Germany and Spain.

There are currently 300,000 completed stories coming from Filipinos and the number is growing by 10 percent per month. Twenty-three percent of Wattpad's Android traffic also comes from the Philippines, and when a Filipino user joins Wattpad, 50 of their Facebook friends are already on Wattpad.

Wattpad also said out of the eight users who have more than 100,000 followers, five are Filipinos. The most popular Wattpad user with more than 225,000 followers is a Filipino writer Denny who goes by the Wattpad identity  'HaveYouSeenThisGirL.'

Wattpad co-founder and chief executive officer Allan Lau said HaveYouSeenThisGirL’s Wattpad story, 'The Diary of An Ugly Girl,' is poised to become the Philippines’ best-selling book this year.

Lau said among all genres on Wattpad, Filipinos gravitate toward fan fiction, and celebrity fictions on K-pop and the popular local celebrity tandem of Daniel Padilla and Kathryn Bernardo are the most written, read and shared of this genre among the young Filipinos.

“Filipinos are definitely a force to reckon with in social media, including Wattpad’s community. We see higher internet connectivity, smartphone and tablet penetration to drive this growth further,” said Lau, “We hope to be able to enrich the reading experience of more Filipinos and discover and launch more Filipino writers in the years to come.”