Whether it was a conscious choice or not, chances are high that if you’ve run an online query about a TV show, movie, book or video game the answer you received came courtesy of Fandom. Launched in 2004, Fandom is best known for its wiki platform that attracts 300 million unique visitors per month. But the nature of those wikis — which are incredibly specific and increasingly niche depending on the IP in question — means it’s possible you assume you found the answer on a general fan website, not Fandom.
Now under new management, the fan-community-driven media company — which also owns GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide and Fanatical — is trying to change that. And the more I ask people about it, the more I realize, it’s like this hidden gem.” One of the new Fandom chief’s top goals is to start to bring these more “general consumers” into the Fandom fold regularly. But that’s easier said than done when so many of Fandom’s fans love it for the depth of information that isn’t appealing to the casual reader.
So we have to be humble and retain and think about the community. Now, at the same time, though, people’s conception of a modern, amazing user experience has moved on. So, when you think about mobile, for example, my thought about Fandom is that whenever I’m experiencing any of these things, whether it’s games, TV, movies, I’m sitting on the couch and I have a thought about the show I’m watching or I want to express that I love it, whatever — the idea is of providing a much simpler front door to Fandom for new users.” He adds: “Let’s keep the amazing community.
Let’s keep the depth of nerddom and the joy and the love. But let’s add a consumer experience layer that’s more welcoming to new people or people who are a little bit more casual and aren’t ready to go deep into the whole history of ‘Lord of the Rings’ for five hours. And I think there’s plenty of opportunity to serve both.” Sullivan joined Fandom following the exit of former CEO Perkins Miller last October.
Previously, Sullivan served as general manager of consumer and revenue products at Twitter (now X), leading engineering, product, design, research and data science. Prior to Twitter, Sullivan held executive positions at Facebook, Groupon and Mozilla. In July, Fandom laid off several staffers, including leaders at its acquired media brands and most notably impacted was GameSpot.
Amid these cuts, Sullivan says Fandom is rethinking how it plans to utilize these media brands within its consumer offering, like showcasing Metacritic scores and GameSpot reviews on Fandom’s applicable wiki pages. With a new focus on a mobile-forward experience, Sullivan wants Fandom users to finish a movie or video game and find “all that amazing editorial content” in one place that’s currently “fairly siloed.” “The main thing is moving from kind of an IAC-like portfolio of properties to an experience that takes advantage of the right one at the right time,” Sullivan says. And by the way, I can watch videos that happen to come from GameSpot because they make this amazing editorial content about the recent ‘Resident Evil’ release or whatever.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
