Wikia Vaults into Quantcast Top 50

Online, June 20, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Fan-content network Wikia has catapulted into the Quantcast list of Top 50 Websites. In the past two years, US traffic has tripled, reaching nearly 17 million US uniques in May 2011. Worldwide, Wikia has grown from 33 million monthly visitors to a whopping 45 million unique visitors a month.

The new ranking pushes the Wikia Network of gaming and entertainment sites ahead of popular media outlets like The New York Times, CNET, BBC, and the Washington Post, placing it hot on the heels of Flickr, MySpace, and entertainment database IMDB.

"There's no doubt that this steady growth is due to an equally steady stream of high quality fan-generated content on all of our sites," observes CEO Gil Penchina. "We redesigned the UI last year to make contributing easier, and it's obviously worked -- we've seen a nearly 20% increase in contributions. As long as consumers continue to value and create fresh, updated, relevant content, we'll continue to grow."

Consumers searching for that deep, rich content is the main source of the growth, as much of the information on Wikia's sites cannot be found anywhere else on the web. And with constant updates such as article improvements and comments -- to the tune of 3 edits per second, and 260,000 per day -- it's clear that organic, user-created content will continue to fuel Wikia's growth.

Gaming continues to be the strongest vertical, ranking #4 in ComScore's Gaming Information category, above GiantRealm, 1UP Games, Microsoft, and Curse. Wikia Gaming is neck and neck with major gaming networks in terms of visitor loyalty and engagement, with more visits per person than both top-ranked IGN and Gamespot (No. 3), and tied with IGN for minutes per visit (4.6).

In fact, as the site grows bigger, Wikia is seeing even more visitor loyalty and user engagement. With nearly a billion pageviews per month, visitors to Wikia consume more content and interact more with Wikia sites than that of Hulu.com, Huffington Post, and Answers.com.

"Wikia will soon begin using wiki metrics data plumbed from its vast network of hardcore fans to provide valuable and unique audience insights for advertisers. Advertisers will have access to a dashboard of key wiki performance indicators including new edits, new articles, and overlapping user interests," says SVP Publisher Bob Huseby.