Storytelling platform Wattpad is introducing a new creator program for writers that can earn them up to $25,000 in compensation. The company is also debuting a new metric called "Engaged Readers," to help writers gauge readers' interest in their stories, and Wattpad Creator Portal, a new site for writers to get tips and tricks about improving their content for the platform.

After introducing its Paid Stories project in 2019, Wattpad has paid more than $3 million to writers on the platform to date. With its new creator program, it plans to pay $2.6 million to writers just this year.

There are strict guidelines to be eligible for the payout program. Writers must have had a completed novel-length story (50,000 words or more) and they must have published at least one story chapter in the last three months.

Writes must also have at least one story in eligible genres like general fiction, romance, vampire, action, teen fiction, and horror, with a minimum number of Engaged Readers for that genre. The criteria for Engaged Readers vary from 9,000 for general fiction to 100 for horror. While authors can tag genres for their stories by themselves, a team of experts vets these tags for the new program so the story can be categorized as one of the eligible genres.

The company counts an Engaged Reader as someone who has spent more than five minutes on a story in the last 365 days. Wattpad also has other metrics like Total Reads, which is to measure the number of all-time non-unique reads on a story, and Unique Reads, which is the daily read or view by a unique user over 30 days.

Image Credits: Wattpad

Wattpad is not the first platform to try this kind of metric for paying creators. In 2019, Medium introduced a similar strategy by measuring read time on a post and paying writers accordingly.

The company has been testing the Engaged Readers feature with a few writers to gauge what kind of readers from its 94 million monthly active users are reading stories for a longer time. It claims that users spend more than 23 million minutes on the platform reading various stories, so this new feature will give it more insights into where readers are spending more time.