Short answers, pulled from the story.
Fandom was founded by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling. It launched on the 18th of October 2004 under the original name Wikicities, before being renamed Wikia in 2006 and eventually rebranded as Fandom in 2016.
Fandom is a privately held for-profit company incorporated in Delaware. It was acquired in 2018 by TPG Capital, a private equity firm, alongside former AOL CEO Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co. TPG remains the primary backer.
Fandom owns entertainment outlets including GameSpot and TV Guide, multimedia databases such as GameFAQs, Metacritic, and Comic Vine, and the online retailer Fanatical. It acquired most of these properties from Red Ventures on the 3rd of October 2022.
Wikis including the Minecraft, RuneScape, Zelda, Hollow Knight, and VALORANT wikis have migrated from Fandom citing intrusive advertising, the introduction of AI-generated content with factual errors, lack of customizability, editorial interference without user consultation, and concerns about corporate consolidation. Fandom typically retains the original domain after a community departs, forcing migrating wikis to compete against their own former pages in search results.
Following a California court ruling in December 2025, Fandom was required to compensate approximately 860,000 people for sharing user data including IP addresses and viewing habits with third parties such as Meta without prior consent. The total compensation was estimated at $1.2 million, stemming from violations of the Video Privacy Protection Act.
FanDNA Helix is an AI model Fandom launched in February 2025. It was trained on all pages hosted on the site as well as users' social media posts, and is designed to allow advertisers to serve targeted ads to readers based on their interests and activity on the platform.