An estimated five billion people worldwide own smartphones. Younger people are more likely to own phones in every country surveyed by Pew Research Center, according to data released earlier this month, with their rate of adoption more than twice that of adults over 50 in some locations. That's the demographic that chat fiction app Yarn is aiming at with a new storytelling series that delivers four 3-season smartphone fiction stories before pulling each story's clues and characters together into an Avengers-style team-up titled Ascension.
The multimedia series launched last month and has already qualified as a hit, reaching over 40,000 users and earning 2.5M impressions. The concept is an interesting way to break new ground in the chat fiction world.
"After the success of a few of our original IP series on Yarn," says Talia Kocar, VP of Content at Yarn's parent company Mammoth Media, "we looked into our data and our readers’ connections with certain storylines and genres. We wanted to bring something big to Yarn, something that would engage our users and connect them to characters, plot lines and conflicts, and make them feel like they were a part of a journey.
"We knew that creating a story universe within Yarn’s short-form, bite-sized format would be challenging in today’s nature of instant gratification, but we really wanted to find a way to bring the concept of an interwoven story world that is so popular in comics and movies to mobile and capture readers’ attentions through every single tap."
The path forward led Yarn to M2, a creative studio that focuses on multi-platform storytelling. M2's Eben Matthews and Adam Martin wrote and produced the entire five-part series. They were able to use data from previous Yarn successes to shape the direction of the series: The genres of crime/thriller and supernatural/horror are the two top performing categories on the app, for instance, and Ascension's story universe touches on both of them.
"Writing Ascension for Yarn is quite different compared to the traditional storytelling process. We have a very specific formula that we’ve seen many writers struggle with perfecting over the years. Each story needs to start in the heat of the moment, and every tap counts. Each story in Ascension required this process with months of planning," Talia tells me.
The Ascension series stars actors Katie Leclerc (of Freeform’s Switched at Birth) and Brett Davern (of MTV’s Awkward). Given the actors involved, I asked Talia if Yarn had any plans for the Ascension IP beyond the app. After all, developing an owned IP in a smaller medium before moving it to a less forgiving but more lucrative environment once it has proven its worth is a winning strategy: Just ask Wattpad and its thriving teen-fiction-to-film-and-TV pipeline. Talia's answer? They'd consider adapting it into other mediums, depending on how it performs over the next few months.
"We’ve built a really strong engine that allows us to analyze data on what keeps our users most engaged and will take that into account should we decide to go upstream. We’re really proud to able to do this with our original IP and work with other entertainment brands (Marvel, Archie Comics, and more) to test new content franchises before spending the dollars to produce linear shows or movies," Talia says.
The Ascension series is available now on the Yarn app. Here's a look at the loglines for each of the story threads it includes:
- “Break In”: A detective with something to prove is pulled into a home invasion gone wrong, connecting her to a dark world she never knew existed.
- “Remains”: A lonely young girl makes a connection with the supernatural. Is it the friend she’s been craving or something sinister?
- “Cereal”: A serial killer targets those deemed guilty of unspeakable crimes, leaving custom Cereal boxes behind.
- “The Grip”: An abduction with a horrific twist opens the door to a series of events intended to reshape the nature of reality.
- “Ascension”: A supernatural power play threatens the fabric of reality, with a killer cast in this high stakes, series wide crossover event.
