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Look Out Reddit, Wikia Is On The Rise As Hollywood Turns To Community For The Dark Knight Rises

This article is more than 10 years old.

According to SNL Kagan, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises starring Christian Bale is expected to open with over $170 million this weekend and possibly as much as $198 million at the box office. While there’s been plenty of anticipation for the final chapter of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Warner Bros. turned to Wikia to help build buzz.

Reddit continues to rule the roost with a strong community, helping to essentially all but kill once-popular Digg. But Hollywood has recently turned its attention to Wikia to help promote big projects. Warner Bros. opted to work directly with Wikia fan sites to debut The Dark Knight Rises browser-based game, Batman The Fire Rises, rather than going to IGN, Gamespot, GameInformer.com, Kotaku or other top gaming sites.

Warner Bros. sent two Wikia community members access to the game for a week and allowed them to share information about the action game directly. They didn’t even put out a press release, allowing the social community of Batman fans to spread the word virally. And this could be a harbinger of things to come as movie studios, and possibly game makers, bypass media to connect directly with their fans.

Wikia is the world’s largest network of collaboratively published video game, entertainment, and lifestyle content on the web. Hollywood has increasingly seen the value in accessing the passion of Wikia’s ultimate fan audience, but this is the deepest connection to date.  Warner Brothers will benefit from the Wikia Batman community’s initial reactions, deep content and self-publishing prowess around the game. Wikia’s early play testing with the audience members will allow for them to share their reactions around the game’s balance, strengths, and weaknesses with Warner Brothers.

Wikia traffic attracts nearly 50 million global unique visitors per month, over 850 million page views and 42% traffic growth year-over-year. Wikia has extremely high engagement among their Gaming wikis, which sustain visitors for 30 minutes on average, with over 25,000 users edits to gaming pages each day.

Eric Moro, Wikia’s Director of Programming, Entertainment, talks about how The Dark Knight Rises campaign could change the way Hollywood interacts with its fans in this exclusive interview.

What’s the growth been like for Wikia of late?

There are 600 new Wikia’s added every day. Wikia Entertainment traffic increased 90% year over year, totaling 19.8 million unique global visitors. Wikia Entertainment, which has over 100,000 communities, had 4.1 million contributions. Wikia Gaming traffic increased 50.7%, totaling 25.7M unique visitors and making it the second largest gaming-focused network on the Web. Wikia has over 65,000 game wikis and 2.48 million game pages, which average more than 25,000 user edits each day

What opportunities does Wikia open up to movies?

Wikia opens up a tremendous opportunity for the promotion and coverage of movies. Aside from being a source of trusted information (news, photos, production credits, etc.), Wikia is also a community. It's a place where like-minded individuals come to congregate and converse with each other. As such, users will create "buzz" for a project when none exists, propagate that "buzz" throughout the course of a film's production, and continue that "conversation" well after a movie gets released (into its home video release window, as well as into the production of any possible sequels). That's the kind of editorial and social offering no other outlet can provide.

What role do you see Wikia authors playing versus traditional games or entertainment media sites?

Wikia users are the voice of fandom -- the ultimate experts in any given subject matter. When compared to a journalist who, while maybe a fan of Batman, has to split his/her time covering several different beats, the Wikia user is an individual/group of individuals who lives and breathes Batman. And as more and more studios embrace this concept, and as collaborative publishing/social reporting become more mainstream, I can see Wikia and its users assuming the role currently played by entertainment media sites.

San Diego Comic-Con 2012 just concluded. Are there similarities to those attendees and the Wikia authors?

There are indeed. The Wikia user (contributor, editor, reader) is a part of that very same passionate fanbase. But perhaps what's most interesting is how that audience has evolved over time. At first, they were quite content with being a "passive" audience -- sitting in Comic-Con panels, seeking out autographs/sketches, etc. Then they began using social networks likes Twitter and Facebook to message out their attendance at the show. Now, they're using vehicles like Wikia to author content rivaling that of traditional media outlets.

George Jones, Director of Programming, Games/Action at Wikia, talks about the implications for games that this Batman promotion has opened up.

What type of numbers has this experiment with the Batman game drawn so far?

On the Friday after the game’s announcement (four days before release), the Batman wiki traffic was up 20%. On the Sunday after the game’s announcement, (two days before release), the Batman wiki traffic had doubled to its highest point in years. The story about the game was picked up by literally hundreds of comic and movie sites.

How did you see the Batman game impacting the role of Wikia with big Hollywood and game launches?

Warner Bros.’ release of The Fire Rises game and their outreach to our Batman community (which they allowed to exclusively play and announce the title) extended notions of buzz generation even further. WB was very smart to 1) realize that there is a connection between action movies and games, and 2) develop and release a fairly core-oriented real-time strategy game that ties into the movie. The game created some interesting and unique pre-hype for the movie within our community, and based on the Internet pick-up we saw, this Wikia buzz turned into blogosphere buzz.

What separates Wikia authors from traditional media?

The most impressive aspect of the Wikia authors is how, through collaboration, they reach a level of speed and depth than any individual journalist or media outlet. As an example: Within a day of the Batman game (The Fire Rises) being announced, our community had built a pretty full-fledged game description and walkthrough/strategy guide. This Batman exclusive was exciting b/c it proves that our communities embody the best of both worlds – real-time, on-the-fly gaming news prior to release and deep, insightful, and dynamic coverage that enhances consumers’ experiences.