Fandom has announced an expansion of its executive leadership team as the company invests in its next phase of growth that leans toward social sharing.
Jay Sullivan CEO of Fandom, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the company isn’t going to be a social network that competes with the biggest companies in that space. But it will expand Fandom from a repository of SEO-driven wikis to a place where fans can express themselves and share their enthusiasm with others.
Sullivan said Fandom is already the world’s largest fan platform where fans immerse themselves in imagined worlds across entertainment and gaming. Reaching almost 300 million unique visitors per month and hosting more than 250,000 wikis, Fandom is the No. 1 source for in-depth information on pop culture, gaming, TV and film, where fans learn about and celebrate their favorite fandoms. Anime is also a growing part.
His goal is to make Fandom into more of a first-party destination organized around both IP and individual fan identity.
Sullivan’s new management team will focus on growth, with a deeper focus on the consumer experience, platform technology and fan engagement. Sullivan said the site will do with mobile, AI-assisted, and social experiences that help fans express themselves, find communities, discuss IP, and receive human-driven recommendations.
In the past, Fandom was criticized for overloading pages with ads, ignoring community autonomy, rolling out inaccurate AI, and driving some longstanding fan pages to other Wiki sites. Under prior CEO Perkins Miller, Fandom acquired numerous game news websites, only to cut the teams back and lay off staff multiple times. Miller left in October 2025 and Sullivan joined this year in February.
Sullivan said he didn’t think that Fandom’s core business or value was in trouble. He believes the board saw an opportunity for more focus on the product and the technology driving the wikis to the next level.
“The company’s healthy and doing really well. It’s a question of now we have this opportunity. When the world shifts with things like AI that creates challenges (like the SEO challenges all media face now), but it also creates like new windows of opportunity. And I think that the window of opportunity for us is leveraging the fact that we have 300 million active fans,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan’s new team includes:
● Damon Sicore, who is joining Fandom as Chief Technology Officer & Head of Fandom Labs
to guide Fandom’s long-term technical vision and next-generation innovation.
● Peter Scanlon, who joins as Chief Marketing Officer, focused on growing and
engaging audiences across Fandom’s portfolio of products and experiences.
● Anita Butler, who joins Fandom as Senior Vice President, Design & User Research,
focused on shaping the next generation of Fandom’s user experience.
● Daniel Grunwell, a 15-year Fandom veteran, has been elevated to Senior Vice
President, Engineering, where he will oversee Fandom’s engineering and
infrastructure teams.
The appointments come as Fandom expands how it serves fans across entertainment and
gaming, building on more than two decades of trusted knowledge and communities to create
new products and experiences that bring fans closer to the worlds they love. At the same time,
Fandom is expanding its offerings to enable the gaming and entertainment ecosystem to more
deeply understand and connect with fans. And the company has been able to add to its staff, and it has 350 to 400 or so people now.
“Fandom has an incredible foundation – millions of fans who have spent years building
knowledge and communities around the things they love. Our opportunity is to build on that and give fans even more ways to connect, discover and participate,” said Sullivan. “Daniel’s long tenre at Fandom brings a deep understanding of our roots and what makes our communities special, while Damon, Pete and Anita bring new perspectives and deep consumer and platform expertise. Together, we have the right team to build the next generation
of Fandom.”
As CTO and head of Fandom Labs, Sicore will lead the company’s long-term
technology strategy and innovation, focused on building the definitive fan platform for the
gaming and entertainment industry.
Sicore brings more than two decades of experience building and leading engineering organizations, including leadership roles at Wikipedia and Mozilla. At Mozilla, he led the engineering organization behind Firefox, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and thecore features of the Web itself, giving rise to technologies including the Rust programming language and WebAssembly. Most recently, Sicore served as CEO of Monadic.US.
As CMO, Scanlon will lead Fandom’s marketing strategy, uniting Fandom’s brands and audiences, while deepening fan engagement to drive more value and experiences
for fans and partners. Scanlon brings executive leadership experience from Google, Mozilla and Monks, with a track record of scaling global consumer marketing and driving brand
engagement.
As SVP, Design & User Research, Butler will lead the design of more intuitive consumer
experiences grounded in a deeper understanding of fans and fan communities. Butler most
recently served as EVP, Design and Research at Nextdoor. Previous roles include, VP of
Consumer Design at Twitter, Chief Design Officer at Strava, and she also led design for
Facebook Stories.
Grunwell has held ascending roles at Fandom over the past 15 years, helping build and scale
the company’s technology and engineering organization. As SVP, Engineering, he will lead the
engineering organization and work closely with Sicore to translate Fandom’s long-term
technology vision into products and experiences for fans.
Fandom’s Gaming division manages the online video game retailer Fanatical. Fandom Media,
the content arm of Fandom, enhances the fan experience through curated editorial, video and
branded content from trusted and established media brands Gamespot, TV Guide, Metacritic
and the Emmy-nominated Honest Trailers from Screen Junkies.
What this new team will do
Regarding the team, Sullivan said, “I’m so excited to be assembling this team, and there’s two real themes. One is consumer product, and it really connects to this idea of advancing above and beyond the wiki. So the wiki’s been amazing, but again, to build a consumer-friendly product that we can put in people’s hands that lets everybody want to pull this thing out whenever they’ve just played a game, or just got out of the movies, or just finished the episode, or even during, so that it’s their companion.”
He said the leaders have experience in social products, marketing, tech, platforms and more.
“The platform piece we haven’t spoken about much, but the basic idea is, as we move to augment ourselves from just being where the information is to also being where the fans are, we’re going to know a lot more about fan behaviors, what they liked, what they didn’t like, in much more real time,” Sullivan said. “So you want to have a platform that the industry can either test new ideas on or really be able to find their people once an IP has been developed.”
Fandom can use AI to create test versions of what Sullivan has in mind to see how these social places work when it comes t micro dramas or films. The makers of films, games and TV shows can also tap those fans to run tests. The new exec team has experience building ways to interact with fans and to get fans connected to creators.
“Gaming is still a huge focus because I think all the problems that we’re talking about, much more supply leading to a discovery problem. Gaming is as important, or more important, than ever for for us, and it remains very resilient,” Sullivan said. “It’s fascinating. All of these horror and horror adjacent games that have been taking off. So we’re seeing a lot of activity and excitement, and and there’s some other stuff that I’m still processing, which is like this kind of games movie crossovers that we’re seeing.”
Sullivan’s background
Sullivan has a long background in consumer products. He was part of Firefly, a company that created the Passport identity system and recommendation engine. It was sold to Microsoft and the product became Microsoft Passport.
He spent about seven years at Mozilla working on Firefox through its big growth years. The web browser grew to more than 500 million active monthly users, and Sullivan saw it enable the development of the web as a platform, not only for gaming but video and more. He also worked on Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct, with a focus on privacy through encryption. He also helped run consumer and revenue products at Twitter before Elon Musk acquired it. Since Twitter had so much entertainment use, Sullivan learned more about fandom there.
He noted that many people don’t know so much about Fandom as they get there by doing a search about a game, a character or celebrity. The wiki gives them the answer and the they move on to do something else without ever realizing they were on Fandom.
“Like many people, I was focused on the wiki I was on, not necessarily the fact that there was a platform underneath it,” he said.
While diving into it as CEO, Sullivan said he is impressed with the depth of the site and how you can look up almost any topic. The game Tetris has thousands of pages of wiki content.
“When I learned about the depth and passion about this thing, I really got hooked, and and so I joined Fandom to to be a part of it,” he said.
Putting fans at the center for self-expression and social experiences
President, Engineering. Source: Fandom
Much of the Fandom experience is in text or screenshots and images in the wiki answers to fan queries.
But Sullivan said, “The world has evolved. And and so what we’re trying to do is evolve as well,” Sullivan said.
He said the good thing is that the site already has devoted fans.
“It has the deepest, most passionate fans who understand the world of a wiki because it can have a certain look and feel, the depth of nerd-dom, and I say that lovingly, and the ability to create a custom background. The look and feel of the wiki tends to mirror the look and feel of the IP,” he said.
He added, “It’s been wonderful. But the thing we’re trying to augment is for the entry-level consumer who doesn’t necessarily want to learn the arcane” things that you learn as you become a wiki editor.
“Yet they have a point of view on this game or on this TV show or on this movie, and they want to express that. So what we’re trying to do is build user experiences around the wiki,” he said. “Imaginge a much better mobile app. Imagine AI interfaces where a entry level consumers can participate as well as a deep wiki expert or a wiki editor or someone who’s grown up through the community.”
The company is building new interfaces around that, so that it’s not just a wiki in text in the way that the snippets have historically been created. That will manifest through a new app, a new AI interface and different ways of being in a mode where you’ve got your mobile phone with you.
He said, “You just walked out of the movies, or you’re watching a TV show, or you’re all sitting on the couch and someone’s got the controller, and you’re looking up stuff (like figuring out how to do a quest in ARC Raiders).”
He said, “We call that person like the optimizer, which is I want to get to the next level, and how do I do that? Why am I getting stuck in this game?”
While Fandom has had a lot of ups and downs, Sullivan said the core business is strong.
“In a world where there’s more and more content, and a lot of AI, production processes for games, TV, movies, are being optimized so that there’s more and more content, and that leads to a couple things,” he said.
Aggregating more fans and solving discovery
One of the problems is about discovery. Since more than 20,000 Steam games launch in a year now, the goal is to help gamers find the games they love and then express their passion for those games. It’s about getting fans to express themselves.
That’s not easy to do in a modern era where AI has commoditized content creation.
“How do we let fans express themselves?” he said.
He noted that fans can do that at San Diego Comic-Con, but what do they do the rest of the year?
“We believe there’s an opportunity for the fan to express themselves, then find their people, and discuss, debate, argue, show off and then therefore get recommendations from the people that they trust and have built that relationship with,” Sullivan said. “That helps solve the discovery problem in a less algorithmic AI kind of way. Putting the human at the center is really important because as the world evolves, the information is becoming commoditized, so you have to move to where the fans are. That’s the scarce resource, and actually the human part of why we all do this, right? There’s human creativity and expression, but then on the consumer side, how do I show who I am as a fan?”
I noted that many fan sites and gaming media suffered when Google switched over to AI answers instead of a collection of links. Peopel get their answers from the AI result, and many don’t click through to the web links. That has caused a huge drop in traffic.
“You’ve hit on one of the key kind of headwinds for everybody in this space,” he said.
Some fans who get their answers that way have dropped off, but Sullivan said the people who are true deep fans are the ones who are coming back.
Even with the emphasis on social, Sullivan said, “We’re going to try to clone an existing social network or anything like that. We’re going to do it our way, which is ‘I’m a fan. Here’s what I love, right? And here’s a an expression of that.'”
Sullivan said Fandom will make its discussion platform more robust so it can host a lot more conversations and self-expression. He wants Fandom to be a place where water cooler conversations happen.
“We have the best data and lore and write-ups of every single IP. We have that. Where where we need to augment is being the place where fans are congregating to have those water cooler moments in this new world we’re in, where that you don’t know if you’re talking to a bot half the time,” Sullivan said
How AI can help — and where humans fit in
As for AI, Sullivan said AI can make a lot of tasks in the video game production, television, movie production process more efficient, and that will let people focus more on the human creativity and the joy and the love.
He said that by the same token, if you are a wiki editor or someone who’s trying to keep current with the episode list and the cast list, there might be things you could do in the background to assist in your research to make sure that you’re getting the character names right.
“AI generation is not the goal because the whole value of this enterprise is humans creating content and finding each other. I think you can get an AI generated take on something in many places. That’s not going to be an advantage for us. So the goal is to have the human who has earned the right to be an editor on that wiki to make that call about, ‘Hey, I’m putting this text in here.'”
I noted that there are other social platforms that own parts of this space, such as Discord with its focus on conversations, but no single owns all of social.
“Exactly, there’s a constellation of places where people are doing this kind of congregation, and they each have their own unique user interface and value add. Discord is one. I think people on Reddit are having conversations about this stuff, and then on Fandom. But what I think gets differentiated and interesting is because we have basically the full taxonomy of the IP,” Sullivan said.
The Fandom material and conversations could be easier for people to find than other kinds of conversations.
He added, “We have a fan with a fan identity, and we know the things that that a fan loves. We’re able to put more structure behind it. If you were to try to slice and dice fan data, here’s how this episode took off or didn’t take off. Here’s what happened because it’s connected to the taxonomy of the IP, so the conversations can be mined and structured.”
I asked if he has a central hub or town hall in mind for people to congregate in a social way.
“As we move from being SEO driven to being more first-party destination, there’s really two angles on it. One is centered around the IP, and the other is centered around me as a fan, and they touch each other. But I think that as we allow the fan to express who they are more and more visually, more expressively, we can help them find their people. I think we move from being, which is currently almost completely about the information and the constellation and the structure, to being the fan at the center and the things pivoting off of that,” Sullivan said.