Despite being a multi-million dollar for-profit company, industry giant Wattpad still relies on the unpaid labor of volunteer “ambassadors” to help run their site.
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Wattpad, the widely popular storytelling platform, has long been a hub for writers and readers to connect and share their work. However, a critical aspect of its operations often goes unnoticed: the extensive reliance on unpaid volunteers, known as Wattpad Ambassadors, to keep the site running smoothly.
Wattpad's Financial Picture
After being purchased by South Korean tech giant Naver in 2021, Wattpad has undergone notable restructuring. Though Wattpad has been doing well financially (RocketReach estimates Wattpad's yearly revenue at $50.3 million), the company has gone through multiple staff reductions in the last two years. In March 2023, Wattpad laid off 42 of its 267 employees, roughly 15% of its workforce. This was followed by another layoff of 20 employees in January 2024, representing less than 10% of its staff. Post-layoffs, Wattpad reported having 200 remaining employees. Many have speculated that these cuts might be part of a strategy to streamline operations ahead of a potential initial public offering (IPO).
Ambassadors: The Site's Unpaid Workforce
So with just 200 employees in charge of a site that hosts 94-million monthly active users, how is Wattpad staying afloat? The answer, in part, lies in their Ambassadors Program. Wattpad relies on this unpaid volunteer force to perform many critical community-management functions.
The program, which receives over 1,000 applications every four months, selects volunteers through a rigorous screening process. These Ambassadors must be over 18 and are expected to contribute at least four hours of work per week, plus go through a month-and-a-half-long training process. Once approved, they undertake tasks like curating story lists, running community writing challenges, and assisting users. With 500 Ambassadors on the team, that means Ambassadors outnumber paid employees at a rate of 2.5 to 1.
While there are limited opportunities for paid contract work, the Ambassadors profile says “those paid roles are the exception rather than the norm, and the majority of the Ambassadors do not get paid at any time.”
What Do Ambassadors Get for Their Work
While the title of Ambassador may sound prestigious, the reality is more complex. Considering that they're expected to contribute 12 hours of work every month, there are very few perks to being an Ambassador.
The Ambassador Program’s FAQs have this to say about the benefits of the program:
“In addition to hanging out with your fellow Ambassadors, you get to talk to some of the folks who help run and maintain Wattpad too. It's always fun to see behind the scenes, and Ambassadors often help test new products, work on projects with staff, and see how things work. You'll also get to learn new skills and being an Ambassador counts as voluntary work (which is always good on your resume).”
They further clarify that Ambassadors don't handle help desk tickets, delete or reinstate stories or accounts, or have access to private account details. They also do not receive any special advantages in contests or a leg up in publishing opportunities. Interestingly, Ambassadors cannot be muted if blocked, adding another layer of complex responsibility to the role.
Wattpad is Not the Only Tech Company to Use Unpaid Volunteers
Wattpad is not alone in its reliance on unpaid labor. Competitor sites like Fanfiction.net and AO3 have long relied on unpaid volunteers, but with a pretty important caveat: they're both nonprofit, fan-run sites with no big financial backers. Other major for-profit tech companies like Reddit and Facebook also utilize unpaid moderators, and have appropriately faced scrutiny for doing so.
Reddit communities, for instance, are run by over 60,000 unpaid moderators or "mods". A study found that Reddit moderators perform $3.4 million worth of unpaid work each year, accounting for 2.8% of Reddit’s yearly revenue. In June 2023, Reddit moderators attempted to translate that value into collective bargaining power, staging a mass strike to protest the company’s decision to charge for API access, but the movement was ultimately unsuccessful.
That, in a sense, is reflective of the real problem here: Not only are volunteers not adequately compensated for their labor, they are also subject to a very notable power imbalance. These big tech companies ultimately have all the money and control.
When Big Tech Wins, Workers Lose
The use of unpaid labor in profitable companies raises important questions about fairness and exploitation. Wattpad's parent company, Naver, owns over $24 billion in assets including Webtoon, Poshmark, Sanrio, and multiple South Korean mobile networks. With such substantial backing, it is worth questioning why Wattpad cannot allocate more resources to hire and compensate paid workers. Of course the answer is likely to be relatively simple: it's cheaper.
Wattpad is increasingly relying on unpaid labor and AI bots to manage its platform. By using their 500 unpaid Ambassadors and latest AI moderation tools, Wattpad effectively reduces the need to pay real employees. Replacing paid workers with volunteer labor and automated systems raises all kinds of ethical questions, in addition to more practical ones—like is this actually good for the functionality of the site? (If the events of April's "Wattpad Purge" tell us anything, the answer is a pretty obvious no.)
After reducing its paid workforce, Wattpad has increasingly relied on unpaid Ambassadors and AI-powered tools to fill the gaps left behind. These practices highlight a troubling trend of exploiting unpaid labor to maintain operations and profitability.
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The Wattpad Purge: New Moderation Bot, Mass Deletions, and "Shadowbans" Plague Users
Is Wattpad Dying for Real This Time?
How do you feel volunteer workers should be compensated? Feel free to share your views and join the conversation in the comments.
Unpaid labor is always a shame. A solution would be to split the workload between several persons who'd have minimal tasks each month, but then that would mean more people to gather results from, and admins/the companies don't want that. Business efficiency relies on minimal costs for maximum profit, and members' opinion matters little, especially for a platform like Reddit which has no alternative, while Wattpad & co still do (although the more time passes by, the more I don't think I'll ever get readership if I don't buzz on Wattpad).