Fandom Is A Global Entertainment Media Brand Powered By Fan Passion

Fandom, also named as Wikia, is a wiki hosting service that is operated by Fandom Inc. A for-profit company, Fandom, was started in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Since 2018 the company is being headed by CEO Perkins Miller. Fandom uses the same software that is used by Wikipedia. It earns from selling content and advertising and publishing user texts.

Launch and growth (2004-2009)

Wikia was first launched on 18th October 2004 by the name Wikicities. The name of the project was promptly changed to Wikia on 27th March 2006. Just a month before this move, the management confirmed receiving a funding of $4 million venture capital investment from First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. In another 9 months, Amazon.com invested US$ 10 million in series B funding. By September the same year, they had created 1500 Wikis in 48 different languages. The material was informal that allowed fun elements like importing of maps, YouTube videos, and other stuff.

New Management (2010-2015)

By 2010 wikis were being created in 188 separate languages. October 2011 saw the company announcing Craig Palmer as the new CEO. This was followed in 2012 by co-founder Beesley’s decision to quit and start a new venture. By the end of November 2012, the company was on a roll and had received funding to the tune of $39.8 million from various sources. In March 2015, Walker Jacobs was appointed as the new COO. By the end of the year, the company had launched the Fan Contributor program as well.

New acquisitions (2018-now)

On 2nd July 2018, the company purchased Screen Junkies from Defy Media. In the same year, on 12th December, the company announced that it had purchased Curse LLC, Gamepedia, D&D Beyond, Futhead, Muthead, and Straw Poll.

June 2019 saw the company talking about rewriting its core platform to use the new version of Media wiki software. In March 2020, the company mentioned that all the wikis created after March 11 would be found on a Unified Community Platform.

Services and features

Wikis

Wikia communities have encyclopedias that specialize in a particular subject. Though the wiki’s focus can be on any topic, mostly the prime interest is on issues related to entertainment, films, games, books, etc. This is primarily the reason why the service is known as Fandom. The purpose of articles in Wikia is to give a detailed description of a particular topic.

For example, the Spiteful Crow is an enemy character in the Earthbound and has its own article in the Wikia with the same name. However, it may not deserve mention in the Wikipedia article. The writing style is also directed to those who are avidly going to read about the particular series or character. For example, Ron Weasley in Harry Potter is mentioned as “a pure-blood wizard, sixth son of Molly and Arthur Weasley” than just being another Harry Potter character.

The image policies are also lenient, and more illustrations can be used. Wikia’s terms of use clearly forbid the use of hate speech, libel, pornography, or copyright infringement.

Technology

In June 2011, the Wikia store had nearly 8 million files that were stored in SSD. By 2015 a heavily modified version of the software was launched. It has almost 250 extensions and features like blogs, chat, badges, forums, and multimedia. In 2016 August, the company announced that it will now operate on a Service-Oriented architecture. They also removed many custom extensions and functionality specific to a particular Wiki.

Entertainment News

2016 was when Wikia launched Fandom, an online entertainment web site. Volunteer contributors provide articles and work along with the editorial team of Wikia. Fandom talks about pop music, video games, music, and other related categories. The project focuses on sharing interviews with music creators, reviews, and how-to guides. On October 4, 2016, it was mentioned that Wikia would now be branded as Fandom.

Partnerships

Wikia created many partnerships to develop Wikis. In 2014 they partnered with Roddenberry enterprises to make The Trek Initiative. This was a Wiki hosted community site which featured interviews, videos, and podcasts to mark the 50 years of Star Wars. Again in 2013, they partnered with SOE to create official wikis for most of their games. They also partnered with 2 K games during the launch of Civilization: Beyond Earth and Warner Bros Interactive for Shadow of Mordor.

Questions and answers site

In January 2009, Wikia launched a Question and answer website knows as Wiki Answers. In March 2010, the company relaunched “Answers from Wikia,” where even users could create topic-specific knowledge-based wikis.

Open Serving

Open Serving was a temporary publishing project launched by Wikia. It was founded on 12th December 2006 and discarded in January 2008. This one also offered free Wiki hosting, but the catch was that each Wiki founder would also get a share in the revenue earned. Open serving used a different version of the Wikimedia’s foundation software, but later, it was supposed to move to other open-source packages. Despite receiving thousands of applications in 2007, no sites were launched under the Open serving banner.

Armchair GM

Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis, Robert Lefkowitz, and developer David Pean created Armchair GM as a sports forum launched in 2006. It was supposed to be a US website, but later on, British sports were made an active part. Its MediaWiki based software had a voting mechanism, blog comments, thumbs up facility for giving feedback, and the ability to create multiple types of posts. In 2006 the site was purchased for $2 million, and after absorption of all its encyclopedia articles, it was discontinued.

Search Engine

Wikia had initially planned to launch a copyleft search engine named as Wikiasari. The Public alpha of this search engine was found on January 7, 2008. However, this version of the search engine was criticized by reviewers in Technology media. The project was therefore ended in 2009 March, and later that year, a new search engine was launched to display and index all Wikia’s results.

Controversies

Relation with Wikipedia

Wikia has been criticized as trying to take advantage of their resemblance to Wikipedia. Media called Wikia the commercial counterpart of Wikipedia though its owners disagreed with the similarity. In 2006 the Wikimedia foundation divided its hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia and even received some donated office space. By the end of 2007, Wikia owed the foundation $6000. Two members of the board of directors of Wikimedia joined as Directors of Wikia in 2007.

Fandom INC

Fandom INC is based in San Francisco in California. Till 2004 the company headquartered in Florida and by January 2006 re-incorporated in Delaware as Wikia. Fandom has various technical staff in the US. They also have an office in Poznan, Poland, where engineering tasks are performed. Income from Fandom comes from its advertising.

Initially, they used Google AdSense, which was later moved on to Federated media. Along with its in-house advertising, the company uses AdSense, Amazon ads, and other similar initiatives. Fandom has various other offices all over the world. Their international operations are situated in Germany, whereas the Asian operations happen from Tokyo. Other places where Fandom has its base are Chicago, Latin America, Los Angeles, New York, and London.