Fandom (website)

Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a media conglomerate backed by the private equity firm TPG Capital. 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; and other multimedia databases such as GameFAQs, Metacritic and ComicVine. The company also owns several entertainment outlets such as GameSpot and TV Guide, 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.