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.
“My experience with Fandom is like many people, where I’d be searching for some piece of information — who wrote the theme song to ‘Slow Horses,’ or something — and I would do a search and I would end up on a Wiki,” Jay Sullivan, who has served as CEO of Fandom since February, tells Variety. “And I didn’t think very much about the platform, I thought about the wiki.”
Sullivan says he saw this behavior in one of his daughter’s friends, who told him she’d never heard of Fandom and then was seen consulting the website while playing games on Roblox.
“So she’d be playing a game, and then she would tab over to her browser and sure enough, she was on a Fandom wiki, but she didn’t know it,” Sullivan says. “But the information was great, it was super deep. 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.
“We have to have a certain amount of humility realizing that we provide a platform and it’s really the passion and joy that the wiki editors bring that create the experience,” Sullivan says. “The depth of content about every single piece of longtail IP. 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.”
Sullivan 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. “So if I’m in a fan exploration context, I should be able to see that Metacritic score right there. 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. If I’m over here on Fandom, I should be able to see all that. So it’s really looking at truly what are the synergies? How do you bind it together in a way where it’s just obvious to the user?”
Hollywood studios, video game companies and book publishers have increasingly relied on data provided by Fandom over the past few years to better understand the audiences behind their IPs and Sullivan says plans for hiring at Fandom largely surround what teams can best help expand those offerings.
“A lot of the studios, let’s say they were doing their research and reading their reports. They’re getting a Nielsen report. They’re looking on Google. They’re making some phone calls,” Sullivan says. “In the future, who’s going to be doing that? Really, it’s going to be an agent operating on behalf of that person who wants to understand how their IP is performing. So Fandom can provide interfaces so that agent can make that query into our Fandom data and serve agents. So to move from the world we’re in today, wiki-based, website-based, PC, HTML, CSS, JavaScript to hard core, amazing consumer product, AI engineering, using it on the data side, that’s going to be a little bit of a fine tune that’s tilting some of the new hiring that we’re doing.”
Fandom is definitely interested in utilizing AI in these processes, but Sullivan says he’s mindful that “the human has to be at the center of everything we do.”
“When you look at how Gen Z, especially, but people in general are reacting to the role that AI is playing in our culture, we have to be very thoughtful about this,” Sullivan says. “So when I talk to fans, especially Gen Z fans, they’re very skeptical about AI in the creative part of the process. They’ll just sniff it out and call it all AI slop. But they have a way to sniff it out, and I think that one of the things in a world of information through large language models essentially being commoditized, one of the true values that is very defensible for Fandom is that Fandom is a community of humans. Those humans, not bots, those humans have created all of this joy and lore.”
Ultimately, Fandom wants to become a place where both casual and hard core fans go regularly, which will also allow it to offer even more data to partners about what consumers are interested in right now.
“When I talk to all the studios about the insights that they want to have, they want to know much more real time, much more behavioral than they can get from other sources,” Sullivan says. “I think we’re already excellent at this, but better in a world where we’re getting more people. Not just the deep people, but the more casual people — because that’s, again, whether you’re a gaming studio or TV or movies, you want to know how people are reacting to your new episodes and launches in real time.”