ConnectFans Shifting to Content with Deeper Engagement in 2010
Contact: Ana Yoerg, ana@wikia-inc.com, 415.724.2551 Skype: aryoerg
FANS SHIFTING TO CONTENT WITH DEEPER ENGAGEMENT IN 2010
Increasingly Complex Franchise Sequels Push Fans to Wikia's Online Communities for Deeper, Richer, more up-to-date information
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - December 21, 2010 - As both the game and movie industry invest more in building franchises, a series of blockbuster launches in Q4 encouraged millions of new visitors to come to Wikia, as fans sought out in-depth information on the latest versions of their favorite video games and movies.
This fall season’s releases of Call of Duty Black Ops, Bethesda’s Fallout: New Vegas and the Harry Potter Deathly Hallows movie pushed millions of fan online to engage more deeply with branded content via wikis, collaborative online communities around each topic.
By November, total monthly traffic to Wikia sites reached 12.8mm uniques in the US and 39mm globally, pushing Wikia past Gamespot.com and IGN.com to be the #1 global destination for gamers on the Internet, according to audience measurement firm Quantcast (view chart) and the #2 destination website for gamers in the US according to comScore.
For gamers, a large appeal of wikis is the ability to build their own insider’s guides to new releases, rather than wait for the editorial guide to come out. Players can immediately begin unlocking the complexities of the game and sharing it with others in real-time:
- Call of Duty Black Ops’ knowledgeable editors created a comprehensive resource on the game, including dozens of pictures of weapons, characters, locations, and 3D maps.
- In just one week, Fallout: New Vegas players spent a total of 475,000 man hours -- the equivalent of 58 years -- reading and editing the Fallout wiki.
Moviegoers are using wikis to keep track of recurring characters and understand plot twists, as well as chatting with fellow fans via blogs, comments and forums.
- The release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ramped up monthly visitors to the Harry Potter wiki 180% in November, as it reached a record-breaking 20 million pageviews.
- Fans spent an average of 8 minutes per visit on the site, and have collectively spent over 2 million hours editing content on the wiki in 2010.
- There are 7,322 community-created articles, with 10 more articles being added each day. The Harry Potter character page contains 44,314 words, which is over half the total amount of words in the first novel.
“Wikia has grown exponentially because it not only provides a place for fans to constructively build content, but also to engage with the content over a longer period of time,” says Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. “As editorial sites lay off more and more editors of video games or movies, the fans have realized the best source of information about these topics is other fans. Together, they’ve written over 5 million pages of information about Games and Entertainment.”
“Games, movies and TV shows are becoming incredibly complex, and consumers aren't satisfied with a simple explanation anymore. They're turning to wikis to obtain a deeper understanding of the latest release, sequel, or episode,” notes Bob Huseby, SVP Publisher. “It's a shift in consumer behavior that advertisers need to consider when looking where to put their ad dollars in the coming year.”
Wikia is launching a new reporting dashboard to help brands track the engagement of their audiences on Wikia and gain insights into what other products their fans read, watch, listen to and play. For the first time, marketers will be able to get detailed and granular data about their audience’s consumption of multiple types of media, enabling them to identify key consumption trends.
About Wikia
Wikia is the definitive place for people to collaboratively pursue their interests and share their knowledge on the web. Using Wikia, anyone can form new communities around any subject they love or participate in over 160,000 existing communities by reading or contributing new content. With over five million pages of rich content, Wikia’s communities are the most authoritative information about any topic on the Internet. Launched in 2004 by co-founders Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, Wikia attracts more than 35 million global unique visitors per month and is a Top 100 Internet site according to Quantcast.
Relevant Links
Quantcast November Report: http://bit.ly/hHnZLw
comScore November Report: view PDF
Wikia Website: www.wikia.com
Wikia Datasheet:http://tinyurl.com/2be5k
