Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the internet — can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy?
Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge
Today, I’m talking with Perkins Miller. He’s the CEO of Fandom, which runs thousands of wikis for everything from Disney and Taylor Swift to The Matrix and Grand Theft Auto as well as several publications like TV Guide, Metacritic, and GameSpot. It’s a big, complicated media company in a big, complicated time for media companies.
Fandom started as Wikia — the commercialized sister company to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the noble community-supported encyclopedia, and Fandom is the explicitly profit-driven entertainment platform, and that means a lot of things that often collide with how people think about wikis. For example, Perkins talks about Fandom like you would any other large ad-supported media company with tons of user-generated...