Wiki Hosting Service Fandom Acquired Numerous Media Outlets, All At Once

Fandom is formerly known as Wikicities and later Wikia.

Operated by a San Francisco-based company, it uses a wiki service to host lots of wikis that provide information about entertainment topics and more.

In its attempt to expand its reach across multiple entertainment and gaming media, Fandom, Inc. announced the acquisition of entertainment and gaming brands.

They include GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine.

To acquire all of them, Fandom paid roughly $50 million in cash to Red Venture who had acquired GameSpot, Metacritic and Giant Bomb as part of its $500 million acquisition from CNET Media Group in 2020.

Fandom
Credit: Fandom

According to Fandom CEO Perkins Miller:

"We’re thrilled to add these powerful, authoritative brands into the Fandom platform, which will expand our business capabilities and provide immersive content for our partners, advertisers and fans. The trusted insights, ratings and content they provide will make us a one-stop shop for fans across their entertainment and gaming journey."

And according to Christina Miller, Chief Strategy Officer at Red Ventures:

"Today’s announcement marks the beginning of a new chapter for Red Ventures and Fandom, and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s ahead."

"With Fandom at the helm, we are confident these brands and their teams will be well-equipped to continue empowering and connecting gaming and entertainment audiences around the globe, while Red Ventures continues to focus on unlocking the next phase of growth and evolution of its strong stable of decision-making brands."

Founded in 2004 by Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales and entrepreneur Angela Beesley, Fandom offers a range of wiki hosting services and fan platform providing millions of pages of content, and hundreds of thousands of wiki communities.

Perkins Miller became the CEO of Fandom starting February 2019.

[block:block=87]

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and Perkins Miller, CEO of Fandom
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and Perkins Miller, CEO of Fandom, on the Q&A Stage during day one of Collision 2022 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada. (Credit: Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images)

Fandom had been busy expanding across the fan ecosystem.

The company had acquired ScreenJunkies in 2018 to bolster its entertainment and news coverage, Curse Media in 2019 to bring together the world’s top gaming wikis with integrated digital gaming tools, and Fanatical in 2021 to help it become a video game retailer through e-commerce.

But this acquisition of GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine is notable because it greatly expands Fandom’s offerings to also include reviews, ratings and news.

In the end, the ownership of these digital assets should greatly help Fandom increase its monthly user base, especially to its game wikis, which have combined audience of around 115 million fans, 17 million pages of content and 100,000 gaming communities, per Fandom’s 2022 State of Gaming report.

Fandom hopes that this can help it reach its goal of becoming the most popular fan platform in the world.