User blog:MisterWoodhouse/This Month at Fandom - August 2021

Hey gang!

The dog days of summer (which are a real thing, defined as July 3rd to August 11th, the rising of the Sirius star system in the northern hemisphere) have passed us by and with them, quite a bit of exciting stuff. Let’s observe our rituals and traditions once more and dive into the month that was August 2021.

New Brand, Who Dis?
At the beginning of the month, we launched our refresh of the Fandom brand across all aspects of our company, from the wiki platform to D&D Beyond to Fanatical to our email signatures to our presentation slides.

The future of Fandom, as Brandon coined it, came as a surprise to some of you, but I’m pleased to hear that many of you liked the new brand elements or have come to appreciate them more since the launch. I’m very happy with the new logo, since it immortalizes the Curse flame logo into our identity as a company, acknowledging the impact of the merger and honoring the legacy of Gamepedia. It also reminds me of my alma mater, Villanova University. Go Wildcats!

Our aim with this brand refresh is to increase brand awareness for the company as a whole, but also for the Fandom platform. We’ve done research that shows visitors who spend time on more than one wiki in a session are more likely to return and spend more time on those wikis. Increasing awareness of the interconnectedness of wikis and the platform itself helps further that engagement. In simple terms, the more people recognize Fandom, the more visitors and potential new contributors your wikis will gain. Win-win, right?

Community Connect: Part Deux
Amidst the ongoing global health crisis, you probably thought we weren’t going to have a Community Connect this year, let alone TWO Connects, but we did! The first full weekend of August, we gathered editors and admins from a bunch of different communities for two days of presentations, Q&A sessions, and breakout groups. Overall, it was a really positive experience. We had great breakout sessions that gave us tons of actionable feedback for how we can better serve our community of creators. Folks also loved being able to share their thoughts on how the brand comes to life and new product ideas. More to come on some of those later, including a big enhancement announcement in September :)

Speaking of enhancements…
We launched a trio of wiki enhancements after Community Connect. Theme Designer got updated to let admins pick between a header background or a full background for their wikis, thanks to actionable feedback from admins about the CSS-based full background solution not meeting their needs. Historically Gamepedia wikis got the Announcements tool for notifying engaged editors about relevant happenings in your communities, no matter where they are on the platform. And Fandom wikis got the EmbedVideo extension enabled everywhere, giving editors a powerful tool for adding more multimedia content directly to their wiki articles.

Additionally, we brought Site Notice and Anon Notice back to the platform after a long absence, giving admins two more great tools for engaging with all visitors or just logged-out visitors. I even announced the Site Notice return with a Site Notice. Hat tip to Tupka217 for suggesting that cheeky flair :)

Data Is Fun
Friend of the blog Maggie Owens keeps Fandom staff up to date with how external events impact traffic trends on the platform. Her work is the basis for this recurring segment in This Month at Fandom and on September 10th, 2021, you’ll have the chance to meet her during The Downstream. More on that after all these cool data trends!

Spider-Man: No Way Home had its first teaser trailer drop seemingly randomly after leaking a few days earlier and, surprisingly, it had little to no impact on any one wiki’s traffic. The combination of What If…? currently airing on Disney+ and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings getting lots of prerelease promotion has the Marvel communities riding fairly high already, making them more resistant to a webslinger-sized bump than if Marvel was on a temporary content break.

Humankind, a strategy game where the player rewrites the entire narrative of human history from the Neolithic Era to the Contemporary Era, launched and the Humankind wiki spiked to our #2 trending spot in Gaming, jumping from just over 5 thousand pageviews per day a month ago to over 165 thousand shortly after launch. The top pages visited include Culture, Units, and Districts. Please just make sure that ice hockey is still a thing when you play the game, okay?

Sometimes, a single announcement impacts multiple wikis. What’s even cooler than that is when a single announcement impact multiple wikis across multiple verticals. That’s what happened with Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies was announced as the newest edition to horror game Dead by Daylight. The Hellraiser wiki, covering the movie series, spiked 624% to 25 thousand pageviews on the day of the announcement, while the Official Dead by Daylight Wiki spiked 27% to 196 thousand pageviews that day. Raise some hell… and some traffic!

Did you know that we have a McDonald’s wiki? I sure didn’t until the arrival of the Saweetie Meal caused that wiki to spike as visitors sought information on “secret menu” items from the Golden Arches. Top secret item pages included the Grilled Onion Cheddar Burger and the Mc 10:35, which happens to be a favorite of actor Adam Sandler.

Editors of the Month
As we begin to close out the month of August (It’s not over yet!), one additional ritual to observe is the crowning of new Editors of the Month. Without further ado, here are your new honorees!

Emerging Interests - FictionRulez

FictionRulez from The Parody Wiki has been contributing heavily to that wiki for years and has been an admin there since 2019. Apart from that, they edit a lot of fanfiction or sandbox wikis, but nowhere near as much as The Parody Wiki, where they have over 62 thousand contributions! FictionRulez is a hardworking maintainer and contributor whose dedication to The Parody Wiki is clear, keeping its content in good shape and patrolling recent changes on a regular basis.

Anime - Arzene

Arzene is an administrator of multiple anime wikis, including Kimetsu no Yaiba and My Hero Academia, a content moderator at Jujutsu Kaisen and a contributor or administration member of many more. She doesn’t only keep all wikis where she edits up to date, but also cares about the community, is active in their discord servers, stays in contact with Wiki Representatives and apparently still has some time for herself to watch anime! Big congratulations to this tireless editor for making such a difference at anime wikis.

TV and Movies - AnimationFan15

AnimationFan15 is a die-hard The Loud House fan with nearly 40,000 contributions on The Loud House Wiki and counting. He is a very diligent editor, keeping the wiki very up to date for new releases which have been coming thick and fast for the franchise. Not only does he keep articles up-to-date, he does this with quality and depth like with plot synopses, making articles richer for readers. This is all while he socializes with users in the wiki’s Discord server, sharing positivity and insight, especially around the release of the landmark movie for the series, The Loud House Movie!

Gaming - Lunicleader

has been helping the Wizard of Legend Wiki for about a year and a half now, and has recently been busy almost single-handedly getting the wiki updated with info from the game's Phantom Update that released at the end of July.

Esports - Nicksleben

, for his contribution as part of the support team for the Fortnite Esports Wiki celebrating his 1-year anniversary, dealing with requests for player pages, team pages or power ranking issues

One More Thing…
As mentioned earlier, The Downstream returns on Friday, September 10th, 2021. Pikushi and I will be your hosts, bringing you the latest from around Fandom on Twitch.

Our presenters will be…

- Joey Merkel, Director of Social Strategy & Operations, who will be presenting on how Fandom approaches social media and answering questions about how admins can manage social media accounts for their wikis.

- Maggie Owens, Sr. Analyst - Site Analytics, who will be explaining how Fandom tracks traffic trends on the platform and connects them to external events, resulting in all the Data Is Fun stuff I bring you here every month.

- Max Spector, Director of Brand Design, who will be illustrating how the new logo came to be over the rebranding process, in particular where we went from Community Connect in March. Call it The Spector Cut of his original presentation.

Additionally, we will hold a segment called Ask Fandom Anything, in which admins from our largest wikis have been given the opportunity to… well… Ask Fandom Anything. We’ll be answering the most interesting questions they posed with special guests to handle those answers.

The fun starts at 11am US Eastern Time on our Twitch channel. You can RSVP for the event here to let us know you’re coming and remind you to attend.

Well, that’s it. That was August on Fandom. September already started in some parts of the world, so please, no spoilers!

Have a good one, y’all, and I’ll see you at The Downstream next Friday!