Hello Stars!
I wanted to share with you a mock up of something that we’re going to be testing this week, as a new type of ad that doesn’t add another traditional advertisement to wiki pages. This time, it’s a test of a sponsored icon in the global nav.
We know that there’s a lot of frustration with ads on Fandom. FanCentral, if the beta is successful, could become a key step in helping reduce some of those issues by having different types of advertisements in a feed. In the meantime, though, we of course need to continue growing the Fandom business but we don’t want to just shove another banner ad onto the page or anything like that. So, we’ve started to think about what newer, less intrusive, and much more seamless advertising opportunities could be.
One such idea we’ve been working on is to have a sponsored icon in the global navigation. This would be something primarily geared toward endemic partners (meaning: movie studios, game publishers, streamers, etc) so they can advertise an upcoming release. For example, we could add an icon to the global nav about a game that’s launching and have that icon link to the wiki page about the game.
Here’s a mockup of what that can look like, if House of the Dragon was being promoted:
We’re going to run our first test for this, without a sponsor, later this week by promoting the release of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. We’ll link to a relevant wiki page, and it will be promoted to all Entertainment wikis and will be visible for logged out users on desktop. This will be our first test of whether an icon like this can successfully drive interest, awareness, and traffic to the IP that’s being promoted.
EDIT November 11, 2022: and here's the sponsored icon test live!
We’ll share how it performed later on. In the meantime, would love any thoughts you have on the concept!