Fandom's New Chief Executive Has 300 Million Monthly Visitors Who Do Not Know Where They Are

If you have ever searched for a detail about a television show, a film, a book or a video game, there is a good chance the answer came from Fandom. There is an equally good chance you did not notice.

That is the problem Jay Sullivan inherited when he became chief executive in February. Fandom launched in 2004 and its wiki platform draws 300 million unique visitors a month. Because those wikis are deep, specific and tied to individual properties, users experience them as standalone fan sites rather than as one company. Fandom also owns GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide and Fanatical, and the same dynamic applies.

He did not know either

Sullivan is candid that he came to the job as one of those users.

"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," he says. "And I didn't think very much about the platform, I thought about the wiki."

The clarifying moment came from watching one of his daughter's friends, who told him she had never heard of Fandom and was then observed using it.

"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 realise, it's like this hidden gem."

A hidden gem with 300 million monthly visitors is an unusual asset. It is also a fragile one, because a platform nobody can name is a platform nobody chooses.

Let's keep the depth of nerddom and the joy and the love, but add a layer that's more welcoming

The trap in fixing it

The obvious move is to make Fandom itself the destination. The obvious move is also how you destroy it.

The depth that makes the wikis useful is produced by unpaid editors who care enormously about specific properties, and that depth is exactly what a casual visitor does not want. Simplify for the newcomer and you degrade the thing the newcomer came for.

Sullivan appears to understand which side of that his leverage sits on.

"We have to have a certain amount of humility realising that we provide a platform and it's really the passion and joy that the wiki editors bring that create the experience," he 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."

That is the correct read of the power balance. The company owns the infrastructure. It does not own the work, and it cannot commission a replacement for it.

A front door, not a renovation

His proposed solution is architectural rather than editorial: leave the wikis alone and build something easier in front of them.

"People's conception of a modern, amazing user experience has moved on," he says, and the example he reaches for is the phone on the sofa. Someone watching a show has a thought about it, or wants to say they love it, and the current route from that impulse to Fandom is a search engine and a wiki page built for reference rather than for reaction.

"The idea is of providing a much simpler front door to Fandom for new users," he says.

"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."

Whether both can be served

The strategy is coherent and the execution risk is entirely in the interface.

A consumer layer that sits lightly on top, routing casual visitors to the right answer quickly while leaving the archive intact for the people who built it, is a genuine opportunity. A consumer layer that rewrites, summarises or reorganises what the editors made is a fight with the only people who can produce the product.

Sullivan has named the constraint out loud, which is more than most platform chief executives manage before they break something. The 300 million visitors are already arriving. What he has to work out is how to introduce himself to them without disturbing the volunteers who are the reason they came.