Fandom (website)

Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is an American media conglomerate backed by TPG, a private equity firm. The website offers a platform for hosting wiki pages with social media features on various topics such as video games, movies, books, and TV series. The company also owns several entertainment outlets such as GameSpot and TV Guide, multimedia databases such as GameFAQs, Metacritic and ComicVine, as well as online retailers such as Fanatical. The privately held for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004¹ by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co. Fandom uses MediaWiki, the same open-source wiki software used by Wikipedia. Unlike the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, Fandom, Inc. operates as a for-profit company and derives its income from advertising and sold content, publishing most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. The company also runs the associated Fandom editorial project, offering pop-culture and gaming news. Fandom wikis are hosted under the domain fandom.com, which has become one of the top 50 most visited websites in the world, rapidly rising in popularity beginning in the early 2020s.…

Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is an American media conglomerate backed by TPG, a private equity firm. The website offers a platform for hosting wiki pages with social media features on various topics such as video games, movies, books, and TV series. The company also owns several entertainment outlets such as GameSpot and TV Guide, multimedia databases such as GameFAQs, Metacritic and ComicVine, as well as online retailers such as Fanatical. The privately held for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co. Fandom uses MediaWiki, the same open-source wiki software used by Wikipedia. Unlike the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, Fandom, Inc. operates as a for-profit company and derives its income from advertising and sold content, publishing most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. The company also runs the associated Fandom editorial project, offering pop-culture and gaming news. Fandom wikis are hosted under the domain fandom.com, which has become one of the top 50 most visited websites in the world, rapidly rising in popularity beginning in the early 2020s. It ranks as the 50th as of October 2023, with 25.79% of its traffic coming from the United States, followed by Russia with 7.76%, according to Similarweb.

2004–2009: Early days and growth

Fandom was launched on October 18, 2004, at 23:50:49 (UTC) under the name Wikicities (which invited comparisons to Yahoo's GeoCities), by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively chairman emeritus and advisory board member of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wales' original idea was to use his Wikipedia idea for a place where people from the same city or other geographical place could come together. The project's name was changed to Wikia on March 27, 2006. In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested $10 million in Series B funding. By September 2006, Wikia had approximately 1,500 wikis in 48 languages. Over time, Wikia has incorporated formerly independent fan wikis such as LyricWiki, Nukapedia, Uncyclopedia, and WoWWiki. Gil Penchina described Wikia early on as "the rest of the library and magazine rack" to Wikipedia's encyclopedia. The material has also been described as informal, and often bordering on entertainment, allowing the importing of maps, YouTube videos, and other non-traditional wiki material.

2010–2015: New management

By 2010, wikis could be created in 188 different languages. In October 2011, Craig Palmer, the former CEO of Gracenote, replaced Penchina as CEO. In February 2012, co-founder Beesley Starling left Wikia to launch a startup called ChalkDrop.com. At the end of November 2012, Wikia raised $10.8 million in Series C funding from Institutional Venture Partners and previous investors Bessemer Ventures Partners and Amazon.com. Another $15 million was raised in August 2014 for Series D funding, with investors Digital Garage, Amazon, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Institutional Venture Partners. The total raised at this point was $39.8 million. On March 4, 2015, Wikia appointed Walker Jacobs, former executive vice-president of Turner Broadcasting System, to the new position of chief operating officer. In December 2015, Wikia launched the Fan Contributor Program.

2016–2017: Fandom brand

On January 25, 2016, Wikia launched a new entertainment news site named Fandom. On October 4, Wikia itself was rebranded as "Fandom powered by Wikia", to better associate itself with the Fandom website. The parent company Wikia, Inc. remained under its then-current name until 2019, and the homepage of Wikia was moved to wikia.com/fandom and later to fandom.com. In December, Wikia appointed Dorth Raphaely, former general manager of Bleacher Report, as chief content officer. On May 18, 2017, Fandom updated their branding with a refreshed logo, all-uppercase lettering, and a flat design replacing the previous green-blue gradients.

2018–2022: Further acquisitions and changes

In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom. Miller was named co-chairman of Wikia, Inc., alongside Jimmy Wales, and TPG Capital director Andrew Doyle assumed the role of interim CEO. In July, Fandom purchased Screen Junkies from Defy Media, and in December of that year, they had acquired Curse Media which included wiki farm Gamepedia and websites part of the Curse Network such as D&D Beyond, Futhead, Muthead, and StrawPoll.me. In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO, and Wikia fully changed its domain name to fandom.com. Various wikis had been tested with the new domain during 2018, with some wikis that focused on "more serious topics" having their domains changed to wikia.org instead. In June, Fandom began an effort to rewrite its core platform, which was written based on MediaWiki version 1.19, to base it on a newer version of the software. On March 11, 2020, Fandom released the Unified Community Platform (UCP), based on MediaWiki 1.33, for newly created wikis. In 2020, Fandom sold Curse Network properties to Magic Find which includes communities and news websites. In November, Fandom began to migrate Gamepedia wikis to a fandom.com domain as part of their search engine optimization strategy, with migrations continuing into 2021. In February 2021, Fandom acquired Focus Multimedia, the retailer behind Fanatical, an e-commerce platform that sells digital games, ebooks and other products related to gaming. In late March, Fandom updated its terms of use policy to prohibit deadnaming transgender individuals across their websites. This policy was in response to a referendum on the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia to ban deadnaming, which triggered a debate around an article about the non-binary artist Robin Pronovost. In response to the deadnaming controversy, Fandom also introduced new LGBT guidelines across its websites in late June 2021 which include links to queer-inclusive and trans support resources. In June 2021, Fandom began to roll out FandomDesktop, a redesigned theme for desktop devices, with plans to retire its legacy Oasis and Hydra skins once the rollout was complete. Two months later on August 3, Fandom rolled out a new look, new colors, new logo, and introduced a new tagline, "For the love of fans." In late November/early December, all remaining wikis under the wikia.org domain migrated to the fandom.com domain. On April 13, 2022, Hasbro announced that it would acquire D&D Beyond from Fandom. Fandom shut down StrawPoll.me in August. On October 3, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures.

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Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1377828950 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.