From Publishing Perspectives:
Among statistics from 2018 provided to news media by Toronto-based Wattpad, the company is reporting that readers on the platform spent an average of 1.7 million minutes this year reading stories tagged #MuslimRomance, #MuslimLoveStory, and #IslamicLoveStory—a 51-percent increase over 2017.
Having recently moved its monthly-active-user tally from 65 million to 70 million, the company at year’s end is reiterating its perception of its service as, in part, providing “a safe space online for marginalized voices and their stories.”
Discerning writers on the platform can read the year-end information as clues to opportunities for story directions.
In regards to the Muslim romance category, the staff writes, “While reading time in these categories has grown into the millions, uploads are still relatively small, indicating a huge demand for diversity in romance …
. . . .
Overall diversity is popular as well, and the company citing readers spending “close to 116 million minutes reading stories tagged #POC (people of color), #Diversity,” and #DiverseLit.’ These hashtagged classifications are reported to have been up 41 percent this year over 2017.
Uploads tagged for diversity increased 40 percent, as well, Wattpad reports, indicating that authors are stepping up their response to the apparent interest in this material.
. . . .
(C)ompany officials are on-record saying, “Our team should match our community, which is why we’ll keep listening, learning, and pushing ourselves to do better, until we get there.”
Of concern at the time was a finding that Wattpad’s engineering group was only 17 percent women, while the product team was looking just as imbalanced at 100-percent women.
Now, in its new statement of 2018 numbers, the platform—which consistently has more traction among women users—reports, “This year, people spent more than 107 million minutes reading stories tagged #Feminism, #Girlpower, #Feminist, and #Feminismo, up 43 percent from 2017.
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
It appears that PG must have gotten out on the retrograde side of the bed this morning. His trending hashtags are #ancientwisdom and #historyteachesus.
(When PG was typing #ancientwisdom into Google to see what might come up, the Googleplex suggested #ancientaliens, so that might be another trend.)
I don’t know if Ancient Aliens can be classified as a “trend” anymore. As a genre and a topic of pseudo-science, its maintained pretty good market penetration for two decades now.
The whole piece felt insubstantial to me: lots of information without adequate context. Reporting than readers spent “close to 116 million minutes” reading subjects with certain tags by itself tells us very little (other than that it is nearly 70 times more than the 1.7 million reading Muslim romance).
I guess that if one tracked down the full data from Wattpad there might be a lot more to learn, though this might mostly tell us something about the kind of readers they have.