MediaWiki:Ads

What's your advice to advertisers wanting to tap into social media?

There are a lot of lessons coming out of Wikia. It's where we're seeing communities being built around brands that are very intense. In my presentation, I'm going to talk about the Transformers community. It was created in anticipation of the movie. The community went completely bonkers over this. They built some 6,000 pages of content about the movie, the toys, every aspect of the franchise. What you're seeing is, the traffic continues to grow even though the movie has come and gone. The franchise is benefiting from this kind of community engagement. For brands it takes authenticity that you can't fake. What you have to recognize is that if you're creating something that's good -- a good product or user experience -- you're going to have people who really get into it. There are communities out there and they don't mind dealing with the companies creating that product. What they don't want is to be pushed around. They don't want a top-down approach. They don't want you directly controlling your activity. They want to be heard and actively engaged.Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales on the role of advertising in user-created content.

Preface

This community and website have had an odd history with web advertising. As a former member of the advertising-supported wiki network Fandom, then known as Wikia, we were once not in control of the advertising presented on these pages. This may lead some to believe that the community here is against web advertising, which may lead to confusion upon seeing that this is indeed an advertising-supported site. This policy document exists to clarify our position on web advertising, and how we feel it relates to the livelihood of this site.

Bad advertising

The concept "below the fold" is lost on some people.

What has emerged over the development of this community are a few rather strong and very entrenched ideas as to what are bad notions in web advertising. Being a wiki, this community thrives on user-generated content. That is the focus of the site, and it drives all our considerations for layout and flow of traffic. We are a source of information first, and our advertising policies must reflect that or else our purpose is adulterated and the enthusiasm of our community is dulled.

As a result, this community will never have advertising which strays into the content area. There will not be advertising links peppered into our articles, there will not be flash ads which animate bizarre fluttering creatures that float over our text, and there most certainly will not be box ads with text wrapping around them. As a community, we feel that these distract from the content that is our bread and butter, hurting both casual readers and the editors which produce the content.

Good advertising

This community fully recognizes that advertising revenue is needed to keep it running. However, we're our own entity now, and that does some things for our bottom line that weren't possible when we were part of a bigger network. It's a good thing to be the little guy sometimes. We are a community of fairly passionate people with an interest in comics, science fiction television shows and movies, and the Transformers brand in specific. While we are perhaps a narrower demographic than Fandom represented, we are a community committed to making this site the most authoritative source of Transformers info, and after the move, we have been steadily overcoming our former parent site in Google visibility.

What we offer to potential advertisers is targeted advertising with a greater chance of clickthrough than larger sites. In keeping the advertising placement tasteful and not treading on our readers and editors, we have kept the faith of the community and the end-user. Advertising here is actually more effective than a randomly assigned ad for some diploma-mill jammed directly into the content of the page because it is targeted advertising. You are reaching your demographic more directly here.