User blog:Itsjieyang/Ad Free Logged-In Experience Expanding to Gamepedia

Hey, everyone!

Starting next week, Fandom will stop serving ads to logged-in users browsing wikis that originated on the Gamepedia platform. This ensures the logged-in experience from the historical Gamepedia wikis are consistent with the rest of the Fandom platform. This means if you are logged in on any wiki you will by default not see any ads outside of some ads on the main page.

Consistent with our desire to give registered users as many choices to how they read and edit wikis as possible, there is an option in your preferences to see ads on Fandom should you want to. That is located at the bottom of the "User profile" tab.

Why This Change
Let’s start with the most important reason we made this change - Fandom values our editor community. Even though we have an high editor satisfaction rate, we always want to improve that and make sure you have the best experience on Fandom as possible. Being ad-free while logged-in has always been an acknowledgement of the enormous contributions editors and admins make to Fandom, and that same regard extends to contributors to historically-Gamepedia communities.

Second, Gamepedia wikis have had a program called Gamepedia PRO, which we are sunsetting effective with this change. PRO was a program already in place when Fandom and Gamepedia merged at the end of 2018 - it was a program to recognize the most productive editors to the Gamepedia wiki community. As part of being enrolled in that program, PRO users were granted ad-free status. Logged-in users who were not part of PRO did not.

PRO is why Gamepedia logged-in users continued to see ads even after Fandom took over as host. At the time, it was important to retain this program for the legacy Gamepedia team. However, as the years have gone by, most of what PRO users received was made redundant to other platform programs. For instance, Fandom has a public Discord server that ALL of our users can join regardless of status. We have Fandom Stars as a program that allows our top editors to help shape product direction and receive recognition and experiences. By this year, it was clear that the only thing that separated PRO users from other logged-in users was simply the ad status. PRO now serves as a historical nod to the creators who helped build some of our greatest gaming wikis, but no longer has any functional difference. We will not be adding additional users to PRO moving forward.

Third is consistency. If you don’t see ads on one wiki, you shouldn’t see ads on another. When users know what to expect wiki to wiki, they are more likely to remain engaged and productive. Over time, you gain a muscle memory about where certain buttons are when a page loads. So when an ad loads on a singular wiki in the same space you’re used to hitting a button, it adds a little bit of friction to your utility of the site. And genuinely, we don’t want that (and have been working on performance improvements around ad loading in general this year, because we don’t want that sort of friction for logged out users either).

Logged In Vs. Logged Out
While this change directly impacts our editor community, we know that there are concerns and questions regarding ad loads for our logged-out visitors. We want to tackle those issues head on, and have already started to do so with a roundtable with our Fandom Stars so we could better understand and discuss the concerns of the community. We’re planning to have even more conversations with the wider community soon, so be on the look out for that coming your way shortly.

We do want to make clear that this change to logged-in ad behavior does not mean that we will "replace" those ads with more ads for the logged-out experience. We made this decision because of what we genuinely believe is the best experience for our editor community, and thus feel the value we gain from making this change far outweighs revenue loss.

And while addressing and improving that logged-out ad experience is at the top of our agenda, this change to Gamepedia should remind our community of the great value of logging in. In addition to the default behavior of not seeing ads, users can follow pages, keep track of your contributions, edit a number of wikis they otherwise are not able to, join our Discord, and more. So, in particular, if you’re a gamer who is used to using Gamepedia wikis, we’d recommend ensuring your friends who use the site know about the benefits of registering.