User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/How we're testing the fandom.com domain migration/@comment-107.178.40.213-20181007085611

This rename is ill-considered and idiotic, not to mention marketing suicide.

People know what a wiki is. People recognize the Wikia name. It means one thing and one thing only. "Fandom" is a generic term - carrying the connotation of amateurism and pettiness - that degrades the Wikia brand identity. Would Coca-Cola rebrand themselves as just "Cola"? Throwing away years of brand recognition will only further drop user numbers.

As mentioned by many others, this name is wildly inappropriate for the wikis covering serious issues instead of pop culture references. Do you really want to contain the "Autism Fandom" instead of the "Autism Wiki by Wikia"?

You talk about SEO. How many people search for Wikia vs. "fandom"?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Wikia,Fandom

Wikia peaked in popularity in 2010-2011 and has since fallen. Your attempts to ditch the Wikia name have not helped. Despite this, it continues to maintain well over double the popularity of "fandom."

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Wikia,Fandom,Wiki

Throw "wiki" in the mix and we see that it absolutely dwarfs the other two - all the more reason to leave "wiki" in the name! Google will suggest "(interest) wikia" given "(interest) wiki," not "(interest) fandom"!

As Product Marketing Manager, you should have recognized from the beginning that this is a terrible plan. Cut your losses while you still can.

There are enough legitimate problems that you should be spending your time on, like your wiki software not rendering pages and links correctly on mobile browsers (it's 2018, Safari for iPhone is hardly a rare case to test for) and the utter mess that is the Visual Editor.

It's bad enough that you've robbed communities of aesthetic control by enforcing the change of wiki skins and slapping the teal FANDOM banners on every page, and crammed our wikis with pop-up advertisements and often-dubious clickbait editorial content.

'''You are losing users because your poor decisions have repeatedly degraded the user experience. If you want to retain and attract users, listen to what your users actually want''' instead of trying to be another BuzzFeed or Kotaku clone.

Wikia should be first and foremost for wikis.

Wikia should be Wikia.