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Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a media conglomerate backed by the private equity firm TPG Inc. The website offers a platform for hosting wiki pages with Social media 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.
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 in 48 languages. Over time, Wikia has incorporated formerly independent 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.
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 May 18, 2017, Fandom updated their branding with a refreshed logo, all-uppercase lettering, and a flat design replacing the previous green-blue gradients.
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. Wikia.org domain migration Retrieved December 1, 2021
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.
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 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 "Enshittification" 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.
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 (although NPOV is a local policy on many Fandom communities).
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 (for instance Memory Alpha, Uncyclopedia and others) 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.
Fandom uses a heavily modified version of the [[MediaWiki]] software, based on the version 1.39 of MediaWiki. It has several custom extensions installed to add social features like blogs, chat, badges, forums, and multimedia, but also remove features like advanced user options or skins. The personal choice of using the Monobook skin instead of the default custom skin was removed on May 25, 2018, alluding to GDPR compliance.
In August 2016, Fandom announced it would switch to a service-oriented architecture. It removed many custom extensions and functionality for specific wikis, and has created certain replacement features to fill those needs.
In the same year, it was also announced that the entire Wikia platform would be rebranded under the Fandom name on October 4, 2016. A leak from Fandom's Community Council was posted to Reddit's /r/Wikia subreddit in August 2018, confirming that Fandom would be migrating all wikis from the wikia.com domain, to fandom.com in early 2019, as part of a push for greater adoption of Fandom's wiki-specific applications on both iOS and Android's app ecosystems. The post was later deleted.
According to Fandom co-founder and chairman Jimmy Wales, the OpenServing site received several thousand applications in January 2007. However, after a year, no sites had been launched under the OpenServing banner.
In late 2006, the site was bought by Fandom for $2 million. After the purchase was made, the former owners applied ArmchairGM's architecture to other Fandom sites. However, Wikia had "dropped support" for the custom software innovations by ArmchairGM by January 2010. From September 2010 to February 2011, Fandom absorbed ArmchairGM's encyclopedia articles and blanked all of its old blog entries, effectively discontinuing ArmchairGM in its original form.
The software powering ArmchairGM was incrementally open-sourced starting in February 2008 with the public release of the . This process was complete by August 2011, when the original ArmchairGM codebase (internally codenamed wikia-ny) was released in full. Since 2008 the ArmchairGM innovations, nicknamed , have been developed by volunteer developers of the MediaWiki community and they are available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later, which is a free and open-source software software license. The source code is hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation's web servers and mirror site to the popular source code hosting platform GitHub.
In the 2000s, Fandom, then called Wikia, was accused of unduly profiting from a perceived association with [[Wikipedia]].[https://techcrunch.com/2007/04/28/wikipedia-special-treatment-for-wikia-and-other-wikis/ "Wikipedia: Special Treatment for Wikia and some other Wikis"] . [[TechCrunch]]. April 28, 2007. Although Fandom has been referred to in the media as "the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia", Wikimedia and Fandom staff call this description inaccurate.
In 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, and received some donated office space from Wikia during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006. At the end of the fiscal year 2007, Wikia owed the foundation $6,000. In June 2007, two members of the foundation's board of directors also served as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia. Wikimedia Foundation 2006-2007 Audit page 9 says "The Organization shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded by the same founder as Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Included in accounts receivable at June 30, 2007, is $6,000 due from Wikia, Inc. for these costs. The organization received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the year ended June 30, 2006, valued at $6,000. No donation of the office space occurred in 2007. Through June 30, 2007, two members of the organization's board of directors also serve as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia, Inc." In January 2009, Wikia subleased two conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the . According to a 2009 email by Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation:
We obtained about a dozen bids... We used averaging as a way to arrive at a fair market rate to neither advantage nor disadvantage Wikia when suggesting a rate. The averaging also resulted in a rate that was roughly equivalent to the most comparable space in the running.
The excessive monetization model of user-generated content has been criticized by several newspaper outlets, such as the British newspaper The Guardian, who argue that editors do not receive any benefits or rights in return for the content they contribute to the platform. Likewise, the Journal of Student Research has called Fandom exploitative and argued that its practices have formed an informational monopoly, making it harder for other sites to compete with them. Other concerns were also raised about Fandom's extensive commercialization of user-generated content, where the use of a for-profit model has undermined the quality of part of its database as well as trust in online spaces.
In August 2024, the publishing company Adalytics released a report indicating the presence of major brand advertisements in wiki articles containing obscene material including articles containing racial slurs towards Black people and White supremacy, as well as content promoting sexual assault on several small wikis hosted by Fandom. The AI system used by Fandom supplemented by DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science was criticized for displaying ads on malicious content.
In early 2025, Le Monde, one of the largest French newspapers, published an article on how Fandom was becoming a monopoly and affecting the circulation of information online as part of its “Pixels” section, which documents video game development. Reporters noted that the company was employing tactics to undermine competition, such as acquiring competing platforms like Gamepedia to reduce the chances of alternatives. Additionally, the newspaper noted that new services were created by former Fandom writers, administrators, and employees, such as Wiki.gg and Weird Gloop after multiple conflicts with the company, such as poor communication and a lack of transparency, which caused developers such as Mojang to stop supporting the Minecraft wiki in 2022 after concerns that the company was prioritizing profits over the quality of information, as well as the spread of false data using artificial intelligence and the promotion of dead wikis containing outdated information with the aim of increase ad revenue.
In 2017, Fandom began incorporating autoplaying videos into different wikis about video game franchises such as RuneScape and Fallout. This feature was implemented without prior consultation of the editors responsible for the maintenance of the wikis, and was criticized for undermining the quality standards of the site. During the same period, most of the editorial team behind Yu-Gi-Oh Wiki decided to move to a new project called Yugipedia when Fandom forced autoplaying videos on its pages, with some editors citing that Fandom's video production team had plagiarized content from other fan-made resources in order to increase profits.
In 2021, Fandom began removing and censoring adult material, including the deletion of entire wikis dedicated to documenting pieces of media with adult content. These measures were criticized by users as well as editors following the implementation of these guidelines without prior notice from the company.
In 2022, Fandom merged several wikis specializing in documenting sexuality and gender, including the deletion of several pages without prior consultation by users. These actions were criticized after the incorporation of material offensive to intersex identities and changes in editorial direction to make it more “corporate friendly”. Additionally, critics who voiced their disapproval after the merge of the LGBTQIA wikis were blocked on both social media as well as on the Fandom wiki following the controversy. In the same year, the editorial team behind the Zelda Wiki clarified that one of the reasons they decided to move to an independent host was due to concerns about “corporate consolidation” and how their experience at Fandom had limited some of their editorial independence. The team of editors urged other communities to migrate some of their content, and urged Fandom employees to create a Trade union.
In 2023, Fandom introduced AI Generated Content in the form of “Quick Answers” to different wikis. This content consisted of grammatical mistakes as well as factual errors and was subsequently removed after public backlash by editors and users. In an article published by Game Developer, the editorial team behind the Hollow Knight Wiki explained that one of the reasons they chose to migrate their content was due to Fandom's attempts to introduce generative AI into their articles, causing them to contain misinformation with the aim of increasing revenue, as well as concerns that the company is opting to use Generative AI to replace human writers and artists. In the same year, Polygon released a report on how large video game communities were increasingly leaving for-profit platforms such as Fandom and Fextralife, the latter owned by Valnet. Citing examples such as the creation of the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance (NIWA) in 2010, which was created specifically to avoid corporate control within its databases, as well as the creation of an independent wiki for Baldurs Gate 3, which cited a certain distrust of Fandom's monetization and how it was using SEO optimization to crush the competition.
In May 2025, Fandom introduced “brand safety” guidelines to Giant Bomb. Such measures were criticized and mocked by the website staff in a podcast. Subsequently, Jeff Grubb clarified in several podcasts that Fandom would have removed the videos where contributors mocked the new guidelines imposed by the company. Following conflicts with Giantbomb staff, former contributors such as Alex Navarro expressed Fandom's lack of professionalism in handling the situation, describing it as "cruel even by most corporate standards" after the company's poor treatment of journalists and writers. Additionally, journalists such as Dan Ryckert, who had worked on the website for more than a decade, had no intention of following Fandom's model for the website, which had many restrictions that undermined the editorial independence of the website in order to make it more profitable for advertisers.
In December 2025, following a California court ruling, the company was forced to compensate approximately 860,000 people for damages caused by invasion of privacy and data leaks to third parties due to online trackers used on websites owned by the company, with an estimated $1.2 million to remedy the damages caused by violation of consumers privacy rights.
Some of the more high-profile wikis which have migrated from Fandom include the RuneScape wiki in 2018, the Zelda and Terraria wikis in 2022, the Minecraft, Fallout and Hollow Knight wikis in 2023, the South Park, Dead by Daylight and League of Legends wikis in 2024, and the Warframe, Vampire Survivors, Undertale/Deltarune, Nichijou and Balatro wikis in 2025. Additionally, in that same year, the editorial team behind the Ys, Trails, Xanadu and wikis decided to migrate their content en masse to independent platforms in order to create a more comprehensive repository of games developed by Nihon Falcom, citing issues such as intrusive advertisements on the platform. Some wikis have received support from the creators of their topic areas during migration.
Fandom has technical staff in the US, but also has an office in Poznań, Poland, where the primary engineering functions are performed.
Fandom derives income from advertising. The company initially used Google AdSense but moved on to Federated Media before bringing ad management in-house. Alongside Fandom's in-house advertising, they continue to use AdSense as well as Amazon Ads and several other third-party advertising services. Fandom also gains income from various partnerships oriented around various sweepstake sponsorships on related wikis.
Fandom has several other offices. International operations are based in Germany, and Asian operations and sales are conducted in Tokyo. Other sales offices are located in Chicago, Latin America, Los Angeles (marketing programming and content), New York City, and London.
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