Fandom (website)


Fandom is a media conglomerate backed by the private equity firm TPG Inc. 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.

History

2004–2009: Early days and growth

Fandom was launched on October 18, 2004, at 23:50:49 under the name Wikicities, 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.

2016–2018: 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, 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.

2023–present: Mass layoffs and AI Integration

In early 2023, Fandom began laying off some of the team responsible for GameSpot, Metacritic and Giant Bomb. In January 2024, the company would begin another round of layoffs for part of GameSpot's editorial team. The layoffs included the dismissal of writers, graphic designers, and video producers who had worked in the industry for more than a decade.
Later in October 2024, it was reported that Fandom had laid off approximately 11% of their staff, including some of the team behind GameSpot UK and Honest Trailers as well as Fandom staff in charge of sales and management, this was prompted by the company's failure to hit revenue goals in 2024. In the same year, Fandom had previously announced that it was incorporating much more generative AI into the moderation of the website with the aim of optimizing certain tasks on the platform, including Image Review, with the goal of reducing the time and cost spent on moderation by using AI instead of humans.
In February 2025, Fandom launched a new product called "FanDNA Helix", an AI model trained on all the pages hosted on the site as well as users' social media posts in order to allow advertisers to serve ads to readers based on their interests and consumption habits on the site. In May 2025, Fandom later sold Giant Bomb to the site's staff after multiple conflicts regarding content regulations.
In July 2025, Fandom announced that it was going to translate entire wikis using generative AI for non-English speakers. In October 2025, Perkins Miller resigned as CEO of Fandom. An article published by The Verge stated that the company was struggling to meet revenue targets, leading to a massive restructuring and the layoff of a large percentage of Fandom's staff. The newspaper also clarified that although the IP-focused wikis hosted by the platform are popular, the ads and interface are quite invasive and cause the page to become unstable and "nearly unusable" when loading on certain devices. Technology reporter Ethan Gach described Perkins Miller's management of Fandom for Kotaku's Morning Checkpoint as one of the "worst CEOs in gaming media" following massive budget cuts for outlets such as GameSpot and that the platform had suffered greatly from "enshiftification" policies in recent years with the aim of maximizing profits.
Starting in November 2025, in an effort to encourage wiki editing, Fandom adjusted its advertising approach so that logged-in users who are not actively editing may see advertisements, while active editors continue to receive a "little-to-no advertisement" experience.

Services and features

Present

Wikis

The main purpose of articles in a Fandom community is to cover information and discussion on a particular topic in a much greater and more comprehensive detail level than what can be found in Wikipedia articles.
Other examples of content that is generally considered beyond the scope of Wikipedia articles include Fandom information about video games and related video game topics, detailed instructions, gameplay details, plot details, and so forth. Gameplay concepts can also have their own articles. Fandom also allows wikis to have a point of view, rather than the neutral POV that is required by Wikipedia.
The image policies of Fandom communities tend to be more lenient than those of Wikimedia Foundation projects, allowing articles with much more illustration. Fandom requires all user text content to be published under a free license; most use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, although a few wikis use a license with a noncommercial clause and some use the GNU Free Documentation License. Fandom's terms of use forbid hate speech, libel, pornography, or copyright infringement. Other material is allowed, as long as the added material does not duplicate existing wikis.
Wikis are also not owned by their founders, nor does the founder's opinion carry more weight in disagreements than any other user's opinion. Consensus and cooperation are the primary means for organizing a community on Fandom. However, Fandom may make decisions affecting the community even if there is no consensus at all.