Leora Kornfeld, on the CMF Trends Now & Next E03 podcast, interviews Aron Levitz, head of Wattpad Studios.

Wattpad has 65 million monthly readers and 4 million authors. All of that activity generates a billion data points — daily.

The key take-away: this amount of written word big data allows creative industries to make much more educated bets on filmed content.

Aron concludes:

“At the end of the day, the data is a tool. It becomes part of a development executive’s, director’s, show-runner’s and editor’s repertoire that they don’t have today. By no means does this negate the necessity for a great screenwriter. We need a script to be generated, we need someone with a creative vision on how to take 300 pages and turn it into 90 for a feature, for example. But the data is there to help you understand what people have loved already and what people will love in the future.”

Read the full transcript.

My take: I’ve blogged about Wattpad twice previously. I’ll admit to liking The Kissing Booth. I’m fascinated by the insights actual user data illuminates — down to the paragraph level!