Alessandra Ferreri is the Head of Content for Wattpad, a global webnovel platform. Below, she discusses what is trending in LGBTQ+ content on Wattpad. (Wattpad Pride Month graphic by Vivian Rosas, used with permission from Wattpad.)
At Wattpad, we operate at the intersection of raw ideation and audience validation. Because our creators are able to write without the constraints of traditional mass-market expectations, the result is that LGBTQ+ romance and storytelling isn’t a fleeting trend on our platform—it’s an evergreen powerhouse that consistently drives a lot of engagement.
RELATED STORIES
- 👨❤️👨 BoyxBoy (BxB) content remains our most dominant queer segment, outpacing Woman-Loving-Woman (WLW) stories in volume by nearly six to one.
- High-engagement tags like #BxB and #BoysLove consistently capture millions of hours of reading time, leveraging core romance staples like enemies-to-lovers and friends-to-lovers tropes.
- 👩❤️👩 Our WLW narratives frequently navigate power dynamics and slow-burn yearning. This segment also tends to skew toward more mature-rated, higher heat content compared to broader contemporary romance on the platform.
We often say Wattpad acts as an early cultural radar. Traditional entertainment is currently seeing mainstream hits like Heartstopper or Heated Rivalry. But online communities like ours have been refining these exact emotional archetypes and building stories like these for over twenty years.
Seeing a success like Behind the Camera—which took home a Watty Award—shows us that when you give creators a digital stage, there is a voracious audience there excited to find them.
The beauty of a creator-led ecosystem is that there is no pressure to fit a specific mold. Instead, there is open permission to lean into your most unique taste and specificity as either a creator or a reader.
And as media and trends continues to be influences and draw from these non-traditional spaces, the future of pop culture, and what we see on screens and on bookshelves, won’t be dictated top-down by people in boardrooms; more and more it will be co-created from the ground up by the creators and the audiences who love them.
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