User blog:Ootwar/Blog post concering Fandom buying stuff because I don't know where else to talk about this

Monday morning. You are chilling in your room, browsing the last great sites for gaming information. Not a single intruding ad in sight.

You look around a specific wiki under a specific gaming site, where it has MobyGames style information display of intricate details uncorrupted by editorial bickering. You think about checking out some YouTube channels and see that while their views have been going down, it essentially feels a little similar to your frequent wiki platform's geek-centered videos, but you forgive them, because they're not intrusively shoved in your face on the websites.

And just as you thought you were safe...

Fandom buys them out.

Naturally, everyone panics, including you. Your mind immediately goes to the worst case scenario, unreadable websites filled to the brim with ads that you can not use without Adblock Extension Number Six to get to the essential information within quickly. Why is it this way?

Well, as a veteran user of Fandom (as in I have used this platform extensively ever since it was called Wikia, to the point where they even sent me a hoodie for my achievements in niche interests), I can safely say that it all began - not when they bought out Gamepedia - but when they started focusing on general appeal to entertainment consumers, aka "geek culture".

How did we get here?
Imagine you're Wikia in this situation - you're a fairly obscure wiki farm, but people come to you to get information on their favorite characters and favorite shows, comics, board games, what not. That means they consume ads and bring you a lot of eyes. What more can you deliver to those eyes? Why catered content, of course! And that's when those fun little videos start coming in, on specific articles, you have Fandom's own summary videos autoplaying and it's a little bit annoying, but overall it's not the end of the world. You're still browsing a popular wiki platform that now also makes geek videos.

And then private equity stepped in.

Private equity - in non-investor terms - is when you buy out a company that never had anyone else own a piece of. From what I have read, I can not fully figure out what type of deal was going on, but I can assume that this deal was a leveraged buyout - again, in non-investor terms; you get a loan from a bank to buy something, and then you move the debt you have onto the very thing you buy, so they have to figure out to pay back the debt and be free once again. It sucks.

Imagine you're now Fandom in this scenario - a wiki company that's been bought out by a guy who has passed his debt unfairly onto you, and now you essentially owe this guy so much that you would do anything to gather money to pay off employees, maintenance AND the debt. Not just that, but now you're concerned with the goal of consolidating more properties similar to your wiki platform. That debt is just gonna keep building itself up.

What's one thing that DOES bring you money? Ads. Naturally, you press onto that and start adding more as you go.

Thus, the pages become more and more unreadable, as attached ads fill the screen, an ad appear as you ENTER the website and when you switch pages. And that is my theory on how we got here, how Fandom got the reputation it has, and while I do not blame anyone at Fandom or the company itself exclusively for the presence of ads alone, I do have to slap their hand on how terrible these decisions ended up being. Then again, I do *not* know the extent of profitability, how much they make from ads each month, but I feel it's not enough and seeing how the ads are, it might be for a reason.

What does this have to do with the websites Fandom just bought?
The websites which Fandom has bought are very subtle with their advertising. There are branded articles and other promotions on Gamespot, and one big top ad bar to promote whatever game company decides to pay Gamespot enough that month. Hell, Gamespot's front page by itself has only two ads on the side at a time, with no pre-load or pre-transition ads. The only commerical content I see on Gamespot's sister site GameFAQs are "product deals" on the side with Amazon prices, and a little bar of recommended content, and they'll also likely make money off selling user data. Even Giant Bomb isn't as notorious to use on mobile, also bearing the one big ad bar on the top, and nothing else.

That's where the concerns come in. Naturally, as Fandom took 15 months to combine both their own and Gamepedia's official wikis into an SEO nightmare, it's likely this will happen to GiantBomb Wikis or GameFAQs Guides. Of course, we could be panicing over nothing, maybe Fandom won't add a million ads onto the mobile versions - and god forbid, desktop versions also. But noting the situation they're in, and not enough transparency on any of these two sides' operations to determine whether they need to have more ads, it's hard to think that way. They were likely sold for a reason other than consolidation.

What should Fandom do?
First of all, I'm not an expert. I'm not a Fandom staff member. I'm not their boss, I'm not the guy that bought them out through private equity. I'm just a guy looking from the sidelines. Any advice I give, that wiki contributors are gonna inevitably push onto the staff, should be taken with a grain of salt.


 * 1) Separate the wikis and the entertainment-focused content as much as you can. You know, I get it, you appeal to geeks and geeks-to-be, because they come to your site for the information that it holds. And you want to boost those views on summary videos, reviews and such. That is perfectly fine. However, most people come for the wikis, not the videos.
 * 2) * Do not have the "featured videos" play automatically. Not only would it take away from the experience of reading, but it could also use up people's data plans, which means less future traffic by wary, and less accessible experiences in underdeveloped communities.
 * 3) * Clear up the line between your own blogs and the wiki content. Not even Buzzfeed has a line that blurry between their news content and their listicles. From the last point, the presence of "featured videos", some wiki admins didn't really consent to their wikis being filled with such content, leading to conflict of interest and seeming like you do not care about your audience or those who keep the community in check.
 * 4) * This can be made easier now with the sites the company has bought out. Maybe even establish two internal divisions for this purpose, one focused on community, and one focused on original content and/or reviews, blogs and other videos.
 * 5) * In the end, if entertainment wikis are all you want to focus on and/or all you believe matters in this website, please let users spin-off or "fork" the non-entertainment wikis into either other platforms or into their own MediaWiki forms. Servicing beyond capacity could only hurt your service more, so this is a healthy option, until you can have more people focus on wikis of other subjects than geek culture, or make it clearer that you do and show it. Self-regulating organizations are not always reliable.
 * 6) Monitor the ad experience. People know when they're being sold to, that's a saying as old as time. I would advice to start a research project on how you can have ads on your site *more* subtly, but that would mean you'd have to pay a team separately to clear up what users *exactly* hate about ads on your platform without bias, another team to look into solutions, and they might not deliver the results that you'd require and it would just end up being the same.
 * 7) * On that note, what I forgot to mention is that your ads have been pretty loosely monitored in terms of who can advertise. I don't know if you still use your own ad platform, or someone else's, but I do not want children to see casino ads. That's just wrong, as any "Karen" (by definition) or congressman would tell you. Especially now with Gamespot, it might be a high time to look into what goes on your site.
 * 8) * Simply told, at least get rid of the ads that come before and after looking at pages. And make the top ad banner smaller, so as to not take up either half of or a whole computer screen. Hell, don't just put ads in the middle of articles, it might actually screw up with the flow of the text.
 * 9) * Instead of hiring new teams for this, you could consult the community. But large groups of people have been known to be hard to please, so I'd proceed with caution.
 * 10) If you must, start a subscription service. I'm not saying you should start a streaming service. Everyone and their grandma has a streaming service, do not start a streaming service. What I mean by a subscription service could vary from simple "pay to get rid of ads" to a more sophisticated version of "access to exclusive entertainment".
 * 11) * I understand your concern that simply getting rid of ads for a monthly fee is not enough, we all feel like we have less worth than what we truly have. Maybe do exclusive merch drops, livestreams, content with celebrities, early access, sneak peeks into your own games maybe! And if that doesn't work out, you can simply roll it all back to getting rid of ads, and we wouldn't be worried in the slightest.
 * 12) * It may sound dystopic since everything is paid through a monthly fee nowadays, but I would be more than happy to support a cause when I can so I don't have to make them rely on something that displeases everyone like ads.
 * 13) Simply do not touch the newly-acquired sites. If all these options sound impossible and you aim to be the central hub of gaming and geek culture, that's fine. I wouldn't say the rest of the wiki communities would agree, but I'll give up and say "it's fine". But do adress the concerns of the Internet, and maybe do not do any more with the sites than simply owning them and gathering revenue from them.

Afterword
I am not around Fandom much anymore, unfortunately, mainly due to me losing interest in contributing to the wikis. But I will always be grateful to Fandom staff who have helped me and my friends improve wikis and their activities over the past 10 years or so, by helping us get rid of bad faith users and admins, and restoring contributions, and overall listening to us when we are being listened to. I will always be grateful for that, and if it weren't for this platform, I wouldn't have met my best friends, I wouldn't have known how much I matter to people, I wouldn't have experienced leadership or tough battles that come with it. And I wouldn't have that hoodie to look at and think back on when I started to develop as a person.

So this post comes from deep down in my heart, this is a letter that could be written by a concerned mother to her son. Please do not mess up Giant Bomb or Comic Vine or GameFAQs, do not lose touch with what makes your wikis, wikis, and their communities, communities. Please at least tell us the company's plans for these newly-acquired sites. I do not want our worst nightmares to come true. I do not want sites to become unusable, resulting in your downfall.

I am sorry, but I had to write all of this. Because who else would?