Aron Levitz. Image: Wattpad
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Storytelling Now Is an Ecosystem’
The last time Publishing Perspectives spoke with Aron Levitz, it was mid-May in 2023, and he was seeing off a valued colleague who had become very familiar to many international publishing players. Ashleigh Gardner’s leadership, Levitz said, had “transformed publishing” at Canada’s Toronto-based Wattpad.
Years earlier, Levitz had begun working with Wattpad as head of business development, then as general manager of Wattpad Studios as the development of serial stories written on the platform led not only to books (Gardner’s specialization) but to film and television (Levitz’s forte). Without it being widely touted at first, Levitz had founded Wattpad Studios to support the words-to-screen development that would become a valuable pathway for the company.
Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau’s departure in 2022 followed the 2021 completion of Wattpad’s acquisition by South Korea’s Naver—the parent company of Webtoon Entertainment—and in June 2021, Levitz became president of Wattpad Webtoon Studios. A contextual shift at Wattpad was taking shape, not long after Wattpad had announced its first film project with Netflix.
Still firmly based in the Wattpad platform’s international youthful writers and readers—many of whom would form huge audiences for screen-development features based on their favorite stories—the company’s multi-media emphasis (and its data-driven selection of the Wattpad platform’s most promising content for film and television) had become the guiding signal.
Last December (2024), Levitz became president of Wattpad—about six months after Webtoon’s IPO went to the Nasdaq with the ticker symbol WBTN.
No longer attaching “Studios” to either the platform or the production wing’s name, a progression was completing itself. Levitz had arrived at the top of an acquisition that Naver has largely seemed happy to nurture for its valuable content generation and an audience-rich community. The multimedia approach is fundamental now.
Last month, on July 10, several rebranding and personnel announcements were rolled ou:
- Wattpad Webtoon Studios was rebranded as Webtoon Productions;
- David Madden was promoted to Webtoon Productions’ president; and
- Maximilian Jo was named vice-president of strategy in international intellectual property.
Radish’s Demise and ‘Our Community’
What has prompted our new interview with Levitz from his offices in Toronto is the recent news that another story-serialization platform, Radish, has announced that it’s closing on the last day of this year.
“We’re a social platform. We’re not a bookstore. We’re not trying to become the next bookstore out there.”Aron Levitz, Wattpad
Also owned by a South Korean company, Kakao Entertainment, Radish will have lasted less than 10 years, while Wattpad is headed for a 20th anniversary. We’re interested in Levitz’s take on what has occurred to make Radish so much more vulnerable than Wattpad. Today, Wattpad’s numbers are quoted by the company as figures combined with Webtoon’s. That means the Toronto- and Seoul-based companies report that they have some 150 million monthly active users, including as many as 26 million international creators, and 64 million titles.
“What really sets us apart and has helped us,” Levitz says, “is our community.”
Echoing one of the longest-standing assertions of company members at Wattpad, he says, “We’re a social platform. We’re not a bookstore. We’re not trying to become the next bookstore out there.
“What has always set us apart is that people come here to be part of a community, to be part of a fandom that’s bigger than themselves, to be able to talk to the creator of a story about the decisions they’re making, to hear why other fans love the same story they love—right down to the paragraph level. Do they love it for the same reason? Do they love if for a different reason? The fact that there’s a whole community around the content, actually discussing the content, on our platform? —that’s what has really always set us apart.
“If you watch a television show,” he says, “you may be on X [formerly known as Twitter] or Bluesky or Instagram, talking with friends about that show. You’re not talking about it next to the show” on the same medium, the same platform, as you can do at Wattpad. “With us, you have that engagement between creator and community” and in the same space as the story, Levitz says. “You have these fandoms.”
He goes so far as to say that Wattpad actually drives parts of popular culture in cases of especially well followed content.
“Wattpad actually does drive culture,” he says, “when you’re thinking about older successes, like After”—Wattpad veteran Anna Todd‘s breakthrough piece—or some of the biggest movies on Netflix of all time, like A través de mi ventana (Ariana Godoy’s Wattpad hit Through My Window.
In February, Amazon Prime released My Fault: London, an English-language interpretation of Mercedes Ron’s Wattpad serial, Culpa Mia (the basis for a Spanish-language film), and the associated series, The Culpables.
With a community dominated by young adult women, romance traditionally has led the way throughout Wattpad’s tenure to date, and there are no apologies in Toronto for this focus on popular culture.
“So whether it’s Billie Eilish coming to read stories of her fan fiction on Wattpad,” Levitz says, “or launching Michael Clifford’s music video with him a couple weeks ago, as Wattpad did, that’s what makes the difference—that’s what fandom does. It gives you longevity, as long as we can listen to that fandom.
“It’s like art and science,” Levitz says. “It’s not just knowing that stories are being told here in a way they’re not being told in other places; it’s also using the ones and zeros to understand them properly,” the data-driven algorithmic aspect of how Wattpad’s techs surface promising pieces based on fans’ engagement. “That really has set us apart and has given us a unique corner of the digital storytelling sphere.”
A Community to ‘Follow Us to Screens and Shelves’
As is to be expected, Levitz—over the years, a congenial, welcoming personality, always quick to enjoy an interview—is hardly eager to seem to be trashing a competitor. Radish, which reportedly reached some 20,000 published stories, with as many as 2,000 writers behind them and as many as 700,000 users, was said in 2019 to be paying a single writer approximately US$43,000. The company was acquired by Kakao in 2021 for a reported $440 million.
Levitz’s point is correct, in that while Wattpad has focused heavily on its community—which can be channeled into box-office revenue for a cleverly chosen and produced screen edition of a story pulling millions of reads—Radish was a bit more one-way, less given to engaging and involving a readership.
“There are lots of companies that are phenomenal at being transactional,” Levitz says, his primary example being Amazon. “That’s where it’s best,” he says, “at the transaction. And Barnes & Noble is excellent at that,” under James Daunt‘s leadership. “As we see their growth this year,” Levitz says, “they’re going to be even better at it.”
Closer to his producer’s heart, perhaps, Levitz says, “Companies like Netflix are excellent about showing you something, giving you something you want in a moment of time that’s important.
“We do have paid stories, of course, but the drive to be a bookstore?—was never part of our DNA. Our drive has always been to embrace a community, to embrace a fandom, to help them connect with people who love the same things they love, and to help them connect with creators they’ll fall in love with.
“If we do that,” he says, “that fandom will support those creators no matter where they go—which might be onto the shelves at Barnes & Noble or onto a screen on Tubi or Netflix or Amazon Prime. You know that community wants to support it.”
Levitz grins. “Next week is my 12th-year anniversary” with Wattpad. “I never thought I’d stay anywhere this long. But the challenge here has been amazing. I was an early employee at Wattpad,” which initially might have seen a million active users in a month, not the 150 million it now shares with Webtoon. Although he says he argued back then that the community would “follow us to screens and shelves,” it took him “a little while to get the founders to let me start the studio.
“Back then,” he says, “it was still a very one-way conversation for the most part, where, if you were in Hollywood, you maybe found a book that you developed, or you got a script, and that was the only way to do it. I think we’ve shown that communities are what make intellectual property. Not just stories, themselves.
“Storytelling now,” Aron Levitz says, “is an ecosystem.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on serialization is here, more on digital publishing is here, more on Wattpad is here, and more on book-to-screen development is here.