Catch Allen Lau talk about ushering in the new age of storytelling at the Global Trends Festival 2020

• Global Trends Festival is one of the world's most prestigious events which will be live from Oct 19-23.
• While nobel laureates, some of the biggest political and corporate icons will provide thought leadership, it's a great platform to network with CXOs from around the world.
• Global Trends Festival 2020 is presented by AWS.
• Register for the Global Trends Festival here.

One thing binds the Netflix series 'The Kissing Booth,' Harper Collins' book series 'Dinner with the vampire' and the 2019 romantic film 'After.' They were all first published on Wattpad, founded by Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen.

The pair started what was then supposed to be 'YouTube' for the written word to bring people to jot down ideas and democratize a literary agent's job. Interestingly, Wattpad was formed in the same year that Google purchased YouTube, and the pair who had been working with startups had hoped for early success. After all, the world was ripe for it. It wasn't. A year later, in 2007, they earned $2 from Google as their ad earnings.

However, soon they attracted the attention of new-age and young writers and brought with them their audience, which swelled to 70 million monthly users as of today. Since then, book publishers have been sieving through the 'content factory' (with over half a billion uploads) to scour for the next big hit!

But, Lau decided not to let their revenue model slip through their fingers. They have their own book imprint now, along with a paid model for their users. But that's not all. They have access to billions of data points on what people want to read and like to read and enough information to catch young readers' pulse. In a way, Lau has changed the way stories are told.

At the Global Trends event, Lau will speak about the future of storytelling. The pandemic has unleashed a new wave of content consumption and has affected audience preferences. Lau will share insights from his own experiences on the emerging new formats of content creation and consumption.

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