User blog comment:RealKnockout/Will Fandom Die?/@comment-5956954-20191205063937

I personally don't think Fandom will die, not when it's so willing to give out free editor rewards and purchase entire companies like Curse just to improve itself and the other.

I'm not certain of how sub-domain registrations and hosting works, but if the wikis are abandoned, costs could be reduced significantly. This is because costs come from the use of the wiki, such as serving the bandwidth to users that make the wiki function, among other things. Because there are no active users, the bandwidth doesn't have to be so consistent. The result is fewer ad views and clicks, but it also means less cost. The result is things adapt to Fandom's benefit.

Of course, activity on the wikis isn't super significant. Though a wiki may appear to have little activity, readers who don't edit or are not Fandom users will still view the pages and the plethora of advertisements that come with them. Though there are no editors, the readers who show up to the wiki, whose actions aren't visible to us, will sustain the revenue earned by advertisements.

Moving away from advertisements, there is also the Editor Rewards as mentioned, which you can earn for free but also buy and get them anyway. Therefore, not only does Fandom has a source of income from advertisements, they also have income from merchandise, enough so to provide giveaways. If Fandom was concerned with bankruptcy, they wouldn't be this confident with their marketing.

There is also one more mention that Fandom remains one of the most popular websites on the worldwide web. SimilarWeb notes that Fandom is in the top 100 most popular domains, with the #1 rank on Arts and Entertainment that also include sites like Pinterest, Giphy, and MyAnimeList. Though an estimate, the website is still visited by 200-500 million users, which is very significant. Such statistics feedback into the argument that readers are significant generators of revenue, so even if there's little user activity, reader activity is evident to be soaring.

Overall, I don't think Fandom will die. Fandom has multiple sources of revenue beyond advertisements, and the number of viewers can alleviate concern regarding abandoned wikis and low activity by 'users'. Comments on this blog note of wikis forking over to places like Miraheze, but this is considering the users instead of the readers again. Yes, users are essential, but a few wikis and veteran users leaving for others only means that Fandom is to think of new strategies, not if it's going bankrupt.

Fandom will be fine, in my opinion, and I'm glad to be a lasting user here :)