YouSaid · the spoken record

Perkins Miller

lines on the record: 83
first: 2023-08-22
most recent: 2023-08-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We've got a lot of new launches coming up on the core platform over the course of the next sort of six to nine months, which is going to be in the form of making discovery easier on the platform, getting our search more optimized, and actually working more closely to provide the quick view of content on Google. And we're really focused over the next sort of 18 to 36 months on this idea of having a better, deeper personal experience and this idea of collecting things that you love around your identity at fandom, that may be in the form of going to our events or collecting goods or bringing your identity more directly into fandom so we can provide you more relevant content. So that's a little bit of a teaser for something we'll be talking about next year, but I do believe that because we're so close to fans that we can do much more than we do today to give them relevant context and help them celebrate their fandom better than ever.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More tools than we ever have. And so I think that for me is where we're never going to be perfect. And there's always more we can do, but we tend to spend a lot of time on making sure that we have a good say due ratio, as I say. We do what we say. With our community, and I think we've got to, and if you do that pretty well, then hopefully I'm balanced or you're able to retain more folks.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the same lesson I think that I've had since I've been here, which is we restarted Community Connect when I got here and I worked very close with Michael and Brandon, our team of community leaders to sort of have a forum and listen and make sure we build great tools. You know, like one of the things that is very clear to me is that if you don't make the platform serve the creator, the creator may go somewhere else. And so we spent a lot of time, we have a roadmap of creator tools that goes through the next year. We do a community connect every year to coalesce and bring our product and engineering and marketing and content teams all together in one place with our creator communities and listen to them and figure out what to build and when we can launch it. And then we publish a roadmap and say, this is where we're going. This is what we've heard. And we've actually, again, over the last year kind of launched.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I appreciate that. But that's my orientation, right? I tend to work with our teams really closely. And we do a huge event called Community Connect every year where myself and Jimmy Wales go and we spend time going one-on-one with all some of our leading community members and admins. So I'm very devoted to the communities. At the same time, there's some communities who see us as a platform and want to be just left to do what they want to do. And I also respect that enormously. And let me just do my job to make sure you have a great set of tools.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't at the time, you know, I think there's also a role to play as the CEO, which is that a lot of people think the platform is theirs to use. And largely that's the way I'd like it to be felt. I'd like the folks at the Zelda wiki have no idea who I am. Because they're so happy with the tools they're using, they just don't care. It's like I don't really care about who runs Gmail because Gmail works fine. And I just want to use it to do the thing I'm passionate about. So honestly, on this show, we care a lot.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm actively engaged. I take it very seriously. I work very hard every day to try to make sure that we build a good platform that people can use that's stable and has great tools. And, you know, and I think we're, you know, some place that I think is really community focused. I think we've got the right values. So I really take it seriously. If a community says, look, we're going to go somewhere else. And at the same time, we also have seen lots of year over year editor growth. You know, we're actually seeing more people than ever creating content on the platform. So, you know, I think because these IPs have big, broad fan bases, the great news is there's lots of people who are interested in creating the content, which is great. We have a good experience for our editors to come to the platform and produce the content. So it is a balance, but I do take it very seriously.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not seeing that at volume, and it may just not be that we're because of the content that we're focused on, we're not seeing that as a mechanic. Creating a wiki is somewhat, you know, take some effort. You have to really want to do it, which I obviously want to make it as easy as possible. At the same time, it also means you have to really want to work at it. And how many people want to add to the Zelda wiki? You have to want to do that. And so I think that's maybe one of the benefits of having the platform that we have.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, I think if someone says that they've got infallible AI detection tool, I think they're making that up because I don't think it exists. Because I think that it's very possible to use AI and recognize the nuance that needs to be introduced and use it as a tool to create great content. And how do you designate between the tool that created great content and just helped accelerate it versus the tool that is spamming a platform with irrelevant information? As I said, we have a pretty good system for detecting the irrelevancy. But at the same time, I also think that someone who says they've got a perfect AI moderation tool is not quite seeing straight.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We take the approach that you kind of know when you see it, but at the same time, you probably have read this as much as I have. Even the folks with like actually AI moderation tools can't figure out what's AI driven or not.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The community absolutely flags it's something that doesn't get a lot of traction. And that's one of the things about being so dedicated to these imagined worlds.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, since we're community driven and anyone can create a blog, a wiki on our platform, we want that to continue to have the same flexibility it always has had. But if we see, just like we would look at spam bots back in the day, which may have just been as long ago as last week, if we see a lot of content that's being created that is clearly artificial or clearly missing the mark, most importantly that it's wrong.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you, I've been trying all the tools. And my view of the generative AI tools right now, especially when it comes to text, is that this is an absolute canon of C++ content, right? It's not great. It's not wonderful. I think I can do a better job at writing than ChatGPT can do today, but it never gets tired. It never stops. It can write about anything you want for as much as you want. It is a canon of C++ content. And a lot of times what we're finding is any text box on the internet, people will find it and they will point that cannon at that text box. You run a platform of user generated content. It has to be that AI generated content is coming onto your platform, perhaps at scale. Has this become a problem for you yet? Or is this something that you're actively moderating against? Or are you letting the community decide what to do?”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to take credit for not immediately taking the bait at the words derivative works. I'm just very proud of myself. Move right on. But everyone should know that you said it and I avoided it. There's another side of this. You said the knife cuts both ways.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or create great content and celebrate it without necessarily working from the position of fear, which is not yet manifest.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who are building these imaginary worlds? And it may be that those creators in the gaming world, you can give voice to NPCs. And in giving voice to NPCs, is that going to create a more rich game environment? Would you want Gen AI to assign personality and voice to the MPCs and allow you to kind of play your game in a much more rich environment? And it's much more dynamic. There's an example where that's where there's the positive benefit of being able to apply large language models and learnings and training data to something that's great. And I think we all would potentially celebrate that. So I think there's just as the knife cuts one way, it can also cut the other. And I think right now let's use the tools as best we can.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was exactly the kind of creator answer I was getting to, which is that, you know, I think that there's a question about what is a derivative work. And is AI a tool for creators to do more work, or is it a tool that disrupts the creator's vision for what it is? I think we don't know that right now. You know, our view is that we want to make sure that we are dedicated to those creators.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our community is, and I can't speak for everyone, we tend to query them and talk to them a bunch and remember our strength as a community is in celebrating these imagined worlds. And I think there's a lot of concern about how Gen AI and these models are used to...”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know what that business model is, though, for them. I mean, I think that, you know, it's not clear to me right now that I understand the payment that Google would make for accessing information that frankly on our side is public Not clear to me. I think that a quora or Reddit that it's really those discussions and the sort of kernels of insight the individuals provide in those discussions that people are seeking. And the redditors who are in those groups curating that, they just have a different model in the sense that they're talking about everything from politics to news. And how to fix a car. I mean”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reddit is the face of a problem with Google, right? People are Googling questions and putting the word Reddit at the end because the best answers are on Reddit and obviously Google is scraping that. But you see that with fandoms as well. You see that with wikis in particular, that that's where the right answers are. That's where the community is. Is there a point where you would go to one of the AI providers and say, look, we know you're reading our site. We definitely want you to pay us.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have not done that very focused on the community creating the content and the community members themselves and creating a better platform. It's really the thing we can control. We want to make sure that people have access to it and make sure our admins and creators are having the best tools possible. And again, we're striking that balance of a great ad experience and great engagement. And that's what we're really focused on right now. And we feel that by having that focus on the community and focusing on the content is probably the lane for us to play in. You know, we're very much, I think, unlike Reddit has a lot of APIs that go out to a lot of different platforms. I can see understand that strategy, but for us, it's not a right analogy.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've covered the changes at Reddit very closely, that both the proposed changes, the user outcry, the protests. A lot of that is driven by Reddit as a company saying we need to make more money on this. We are seeing the open AIs and the Googles of the world come to Reddit, train in all of our user-generated content, and then make money selling AI elsewhere. We want to get paid for that. Squint in fandom has the exact same problem. Have you gone to Google and OpenAI and Microsoft and Anthropic, whoever else, and said, look, if you want to scrape our site, you have to pay us.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, been cut out of the market. So I tend to think that users, though, especially in our world, want authentic communities to talk about the content they love and they want to create that content themselves. And so, you know, we're focused on this idea of, you know, my fandoms and creating the way for you to kind of come and be a part of our community. We have several million people registered with fandom today, and we think that's going to continue to grow. And in fact, it may be the case that if AIs tend to get more isolated and tend to train on more polarized information that may be incorrect, there's probably going to be an opportunity for platforms that are, again, deeply vertically focused around community that will essentially deflect that trend.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's ecosystem, right? Yeah. I think there's a couple things that I think are interesting to consider. One is how does new content get created? And I think that right now there's a lot of communities creating content everywhere. And if you lose publishing, this is publishing broadly. If you lose publishing broadly because there's no economic basis for people to go to a website and watch read Content of CNET or subscribe to a platform, it's kind of recursive. It's going to be a problem for the AI. What will it be sourcing? And you're probably left with social media as your primary source of content, which as we know tends to unfortunately be polarized. The content at the extremes tends to be more and more prominent. And so you can possibly assume that, in fact, the AIs will start to train on more polarized information that's probably incorrect. And it's also not training on new data because those sources have”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's okay Because if you have the communities of interest who are galvanized together around the IP, that's going to be durable regardless.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if we stay dedicated to that, I think that that remains incredibly powerful because I think there's always going to be, you know, I think you're going to slice off some of those transactional queries.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trust me, I have a model that calibrates for some loss of. Traffic, that's because the tooling that power barred gets to the point where it's effectively, and again, you're probably on the prototype as I'm on the prototype to sort of see how the Gen AI results. And today, I'm still going through to see the series of links because the answer is typically is incomplete or not quite correct. I think there's absolutely a future where, and I don't know what the time horizon is, where, you know, a very nuanced AI who can get intentionality correct and can consistently give you the answers to the questions you're seeking results in a very serious challenge for anybody who has content anywhere. But we're focused on right now is what are the communities doing together in support of these IPs they love?”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not the perfect storm. That's just a linear progression from here to there with Google. How are you accounting for that? Have you gone to Google and said, look, you need to start paying us for this training data. Have you said, look, we're going to block you from robots txt or whatever brute force mechanism there is. There's some big trade-offs in there and they're not all the perfect storm.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But so, like, a huge part of games publishing right now is Zelda guides, like Zelda guides targeted to search is a massive amount of games publishing right now. Like every game is published right now, including the ones here at Vox Media Polygon, right? Totally devoted to Zelda guides. Eventually, Google's just going to be able to read all of that, right? Because part of the deal with Google right now is that we allow them to index our sites such that we might get the search traffic. And that relationship might change as they roll out more and more of their AI experience.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that scenario, again, if there's a query that is precise, that you really know there's one answer to? Yeah, I think that there's absolutely the case where Gen AI and that result will work. I think you've seen Google Part.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say there's even to go with Bezos 70% of the perfect storm. I Google how do I beat some shrine in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom? Google has scraped enough of fandom and enough of IGN, enough of whatever to deliver the answer to that question in the search generative experience. And maybe they can't for all the other stuff, right? You're figuring out, you're asking your question about Star Trek, and maybe you do land on fandom for that one. But there's a huge chunk that Google could take today because the answer is fixed, right? There's a way to beat the shrine. And people have typed it into text boxes on the internet. And Google can read it and it can spit it right back out at you. How do you account for that scenario?”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The memory alpha platform on Fanda, which is our Star Trek platform. And I'll dive into the rabbit hole. And sure enough, I'm going to find out when Worf showed up on the enterprise. That feels to me like a scenario that's likely pretty durable, just the way I see behavior working today. It doesn't mean I don't think that perfect storm will happen where there's an AI.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of any sort of immediate action, I tend to then think about well, what are the other likely outcomes? Have people built up a set of behaviors around discovery where they're putting random keywords into a search engine and kind of seeing what shows up because they've got like three things or sort of wanting to put together. And Google's done a really good job of saying, oh, you give me three things. I'm going to take the indexing capabilities I have and give you a series of results that I think maybe in the landing zone of what you're looking for. I feel like that's a pretty good way for people to process, which is like, I don't know exactly what I'm asking. I kind of have like a few things. I want to sort of bang them into a box and see what shows up. And if I throw them all in there, you know, and I put in, you know, Kirk and Enterprise and Worf, you know, like that's when I'm like, when did he show up on the enterprise? Yeah, I'm going to get like fan. I'm like, oh, there's.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spent a lot of time kind of inside these services to kind of evaluate and test. And we do consider one outcome, which is Gen AI disrupts all discovery. And the chat partner is able to Quickly interpret your intention and get you exactly the right answer. This is this idea of the perfect storm scenario that the AI evolves the point where of the 350 million folks we have every month, every query that that person has is exactly interpreted correctly by the AI to get that person the exact answer they were seeking I tend to score that probability.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matters because we have 45 million pages of content around these natural worlds. And we've got tens of thousands of community members who are constantly kind of weighing in about nuance and talking about how things connect to one another and laying that out. And again, there may be a moment in the future where these language models and the way Gen AI works will be able to solve for the questions you have in a curious way and with the right context and relevancy. But right now, and I think for the foreseeable kind of immediate future, I think these, you know, the sense of vertical deep communities being really important to people who are trying to get some esoteric information, I think is really, really valuable. I think, you know, generic stuff like, what's the temperature in Phoenix today? I mean, sure, that's a very broad general piece of information required.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try to say, okay, faced with an uncertain future, how do we narrow that uncertainty? And the way I tend to approach it is to say, well, what kind of outcomes could we see happening? You could see an outcome where search is decimated by Gen AI. You could see an outcome where it's really lumpy and it's not clear that people know exactly how Gen AI will impact discovery. And then he could sort of say, well, there's a path where you say, well, verticalization will be more important than ever because domain expertise and understanding will always have its place. And so in those kind of three scenarios, I tend to think that the third one, this idea that deep verticalization and communities will be more important than ever because there's just so much information all the time. It's all about context and relevancy. And it's what we actually specialize in. We'll tell you what.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think part of it is maybe the underlying question is how does gen AI and these large language models and the sort of indexing of the internet change over time? And I think our thesis, and as you can tell, kind of nerdy, I also do a lot of thinking and scenario structures.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think our approach, and again, I'm getting a little bit to the side of your question, which is we weren't as infected by the bigger changes that Apple will deploy simply because our app strategy is not as material on the core. Fan wikis, but where we'd be very specific on utility because we're also really narrow casting, we're just looking at like what to watch, we also were okay and have been able to weather that storm pretty well.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're much more an MW, mobile web, and DWEB, desktop web platform. We have a native app, and it's good, but we're much more focused on the MWeb and DWEB experiences because we have such a complex platform. You know, we have 45 million pages of content. We're really trying to get people to the places they want to be in order to get the experience they want and the answers that they're seeking. And so we haven't been able to find a way elegantly to do that in the native mobile experience yet. So we weren't impacted as much by that change that occurred that affect more native mobile apps because we're so DWEB and MWEB oriented, which is fine. I do think that there's definitely opportunity. I mean, for example, our TV guide app is a great app and that's actually doing really well. You know, we find that's a great platform again to solve a singular utility.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at what happened to Meta in Google when Apple rolled out app tracking transparency, their revenues fell down because their ability to target changed. Meta appears to have figured it out in their latest earnings. Did that impact you the same way? We were on a huge advertising business at scale on mobile phones. You have apps, you have websites. Did you feel that the same way? Were you able to say, okay, meta's got problems. We're right next to the IP that people care about. Shift your spend to us.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time because you know, we don't want people to have a bad experience. And we do need to throw ads though. So it's that, it's, again, it's a bit of a contradiction that we have to manage through.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They see ads that aren't relevant to them. That's when it tends to set them off. This is irrelevant and therefore necessary. So we're working on this idea that, hey, we've got these insights. Can we make things more relevant for folks than it is today? And I think that's a, again, it's one of those things that doesn't really have a finish line. It just got to do a better job. And I think the other part of it is we're consumed 60% on mobile, right? So, and that's just a smaller amount of surface area. And yet we have a massively dense amount of content that people want to navigate through. And I'm very sensitive to it. I spend all my time kind of evaluating and figuring it out with our product and tech teams. So we do think there's a path to make that even more elegant experience, but it's harder just because the surface area is just more difficult to work with. So I'm never going to claim that we have it right. I can tell you we work on it a lot and actually study the data.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you're asking the age old question, which is how much advertising is the right amount of advertising? And, you know, I think we're doing our best to make it as elegant as we can. And yet we need to drive the economics. I would like there to be better matches overall. Because people, when they see an ad they like, don't complain about it.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's actually photos of me in my Star Trek. I was actually, Rochelle made me get a different outfit as Commander Pike this time and not as Captain Kirk, you know, which was my preferred cosplay for the Star Trek celebrations. At any rate, the short of this is because we're fans, we know what fans like and love, and we have these insights. That's where we're distinguishing ourselves is that you can go try to buy just basic demographics kind of anywhere. You can buy reach anywhere, but it's really hard to do reach and targeting to the degree we can do, especially if you're, again, if you're in the market of reaching fans, like there's really no better platform to do it. And so that's where we've been winning share.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I think what we do differently, if you were here, you'd probably look at the business and see the same thing as I did, which is we've got a lot of signals as folks come in. If you've got $350 million every month coming in and looking at entertainment content, you've got some really interesting insights in terms of what people want to watch or what games they want to play. And what we've built is a platform called fan DNA. And what it does is basically says like, okay, hey, look, we're just not taking any personal identifiable information. But we're able to see patterns of behavior. And what we've been able to build through fan DNA is a set of insights, which we work with these partners to help them just make a better match between the ad message they have and the customers they're trying to reach. And I think we do a really good job with that. And because we also kind of know what's relevant to fans, because we're at Comic-Con and I put on my Star Trek Cosby.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do about 50 50, so we have a split between what we consider our endemic partners. So that's the game studios and the movie studios and the TV streaming companies. And then we, the non endemic, you know, so everybody from like an FDA to Comcast, you know, those are platforms and businesses that are trying to reach audiences. And we happen to be very significant collection of young folks who are interested in gaming and movies and TV. And so we'll work with them to help them reach those folks.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work across our social platforms to make sure people's voices get out there. And then we do things that essentially cross over to different platforms. So if you're thinking about a movie release or a game release, that's going to be better architected around what can we learn from Metacritic and driving into the wiki or what can we learn from GameSpot and how do we marry that up in a way that maintains our editorial independence, but then gives those brands a way to connect to the fans. So it's a mix of those things, the mix of sort of display and brand advertising, events and social activation that we kind of bundle together in a way we try our best to be elegant by.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we have advertising. We also have a small subscription business on GiantBomb. So we have some of the greatest voices in video gaming that people subscribe to on GiantBomb. It's also awesome. And then we have advertising. And the advertising that you're always trying to do is get the right balance between engagement. So we want to make sure people come to the platform and get satisfied with the answers they get and also the creators can come create the content they want. On the other hand, it does cost us money to support and develop and try to build these experiences, which we think are really meaningful and give people this discovery. So the advertisers come in and we run brand campaigns. We do live events. We do the largest party at San Diego Comic-Con, for example, where we had Korean bandplay and it's a huge event. We do the same thing across other Comic-Cons around the world. And so we have a really good sort of events activation team. And then we do.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The revenue comes in two big buckets. I mean, one, we do sell games, so we're a reseller of games on Fanatical, which is a smaller part of our business, but it's growing really meaningfully because we have a great team of folks that creates great bundles and packages of games for people to buy and play, which is awesome.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, I think content moderation questions for platform CEOs are sort of infinitely complex. But I wanted to just ask that set of questions because it gives you a sense what fandom is, right? Making a user content platform this commercial carries with it a different set of challenges than I think the more wide open platforms you might otherwise compare it to, the Reddits and Instagrams of the world. Here you have a focus, you have partnerships, and I think the shape of that is meaningfully different. And I wanted to make sure we got a hold of that because my next question is, okay, how does that make money? Is it just display advertising? Is it integrations with the brands? Where does the revenue come from?”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all about what is the right focus for the company. And the right focus for the company is around these, again, the communities who want to celebrate these imagined worlds and making sure that as long as you're not going into that ad hominem so you're not attacking individuals, if you're really talking about here's how to celebrate my love of Harry Potter, that's the lane that we want to make sure we stay clearly focused and drive straight down the middle of. You know, on the one hand, you can make it really complicated and there's always going to be nuance and there's going to be bumps in the road and you're not going to head it right all the time. Like I said, there's no finish line to this and there's no perfection. It's all about setting the right intention. You know, I think generally speaking, we do get it right, but you're 100% correct, which is it's not easy. And it's one of those things, again, if you stay really focused, though, on the mission of like we're about fan identity or about imagined worlds, that sort of keeps us in that lane pretty cleanly.”
2023-08-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT