Welcome back to our monthly* Community Partnerships blog series! Previously, we shared an introduction to gaming partnerships back in March and followed that up with an introduction to entertainment partnerships in April. *We missed May and June, and we apologize for that, but rest assured our team has been hard at work building relationships with gaming and entertainment partners.
Today, we’re excited to delve into another area of partnerships: how the Community Partnerships team builds collaborations between advertising partners and wiki communities to highlight upcoming releases, obtain cool perks for wiki editors, and more.
Bringing Advertising Value Directly to Communities[]
I’m not going to beat around the bush: ads are a controversial topic on Fandom. Our ad experience, to quote a recent Staff Blog, sucks. Fortunately, that’s something that our Product/Tech, Revenue, and Community teams are working to improve. In another recent Staff Blog, we talked about how Fandom’s focus on driving engagement and utility for fans on the platform will improve the user experience and allow for improvements to the ad experience on Fandom.
Despite the current issues, which are understandably one of the biggest sources of negative editor feedback about the platform, part of our job as the Community Partnerships team is to work with advertising partners to bring a little extra value to the Fandom editor community. This isn’t an area of our team we’ve talked that much about in the past, but is something we started talking more about at Community Connect 2024.
In a lot of the advertising deals that Fandom’s sales team works on, we encourage advertising partners to not just advertise on the platform through traditional banner ads but to bring something to the community that’s about the IP they’re advertising. What does that look like? Partners have the opportunity to provide things like:
- High-quality promotional materials (images, videos, etc) that our team can use to offer a redesign of the wiki, with pre-approval from the wiki’s admins;
- Early access to content which, with pre-approval from the admins, our content development teams including Wiki Specialists can use to help the community create foundational wiki pages for upcoming releases, giving them a leg up ahead of the release of a game, show, or movie;
Thanks to the collaboration of our partners, Fandom is also often able to provide admins with Editor Rewards that allow us to give back to the community. Those can come in the form of covering the cost of streaming subscriptions, movie tickets, game codes, and in-game currency.
Remember how I said that this isn’t an area of our team we’ve talked that much about? It may surprise you to know that the Community team has successfully facilitated hundreds of these kinds of partnerships with communities and advertising partners over the last 5+ years, to provide extra benefit for Fandom wikis and the community.
All of our activations are done with the approval of the wiki’s admins, or in some cases – like Shogun Wiki – are brand new wikis that we build and that don’t yet have an active community.
You can see a few of our favorite recent wiki refreshes at right.
Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Activation[]
Another recent activation that we were really excited about was for Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which is an example of a great community collaboration.
Fandom partnered with Ubisoft and the Assassin’s Creed Wiki to promote the highly-anticipated upcoming game, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Ubisoft, who we’re fortunate to have been able to build a great relationship with, provided us with official promotional materials for the game. Our team then worked with the admins on the Assassin’s Creed Wiki to refresh its design and content, and to prominently feature the game. You can see some of the results here, with an in-depth page with informative information about a game that hasn’t come out yet.
In recognition of all the great work the admins of the wiki do, and in wanting to give back, Fandom provided the admins and a number of key contributors with complimentary premium versions of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, a unique benefit offered by being a member of the Fandom community.
Building Stronger Connections[]
Bringing community value into advertising deals aims to further our partnership mission of building connections between wikis and the studios that make the games, shows, and movies those wikis are about. It’s all voluntary, with wiki admins having the final say over whether they want to participate in any partnerships. It’s also a value add to the partner; we may strike a community partnership as part of an advertising deal, but the partner doesn’t actually pay to work with the community – we offer it because we think it’s of genuine value for the partner and for the community.
Ultimately, our goal is to offer editors a unique experience with Fandom and with partners, and to help advertising partners fully appreciate the importance of wikis to prospective audiences; both of which, in turn, can open the door to even greater collaboration and even better opportunities for Fandom wikis in the future.
In next month’s Community Partnerships blog, we’ll share the latest developments in the world of gaming community partnerships. Stay tuned for that!
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