Text size Allen Lau has a behind-the-scenes view of how people are staying entertained during the pandemic. Lau, 52, is the Toronto-based CEO and co-founder of the Canadian entertainment company Wattpad. Its core product is an app that lets writers and readers around the world share and discover stories. “Because we have so much content, we see a million uploads every day in 50 languages around the world,” Lau says. As countries started with Covid-19 restrictions, he noticed clear shifts in usage patterns. “The impact on us, (looking) at numbers in terms of number of readers and writers, reading time, and number of stories uploaded, increased by 30% to 100% literally overnight when we saw a country starting to lock down,” he says.