Numlock Sunday: Julia Alexander on Wattpad

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Julia Alexander who wrote “From Fanfiction to Netflix Hits” for The Verge, a very cool profile of the site Wattpad. Then, a week later, Wattpad got bought for $600 million. Here's what I wrote about it:

Wattpad, originally an e-reading app that’s since become an incredibly popular platform for original works, was recently acquired by Korean conglomerate Naver, best known as the owners of the Webtoon comics platform for $600 million. The tie-up forms a company operating hugely popular platforms for amateur but incredibly popular stories, a body of work that is promising in terms of adaptations and intellectual property. Wattpad has 90 million people visit per month, hosts a billion stories and has users who spend 22 billion minutes per month reading it…