My initial guess is ads, but is there more to it?
Said videos take about 10 seconds to show up and will cause the screen to scroll to a different point from where you are currently reading
Their privacy policy is exhaustive, and you opt in by default to sharing your data with Google and 7 other analytics providers
UI noise like "share to Instagram/YouTube/LinkedIn" that probably 0.1% of people even consider using
When you're on a specific game wiki, you care only about that wiki content, but fandom places a Fandom navigation bar and side menu
Their default email strategy sent almost daily updates for random posts on (unrelated) FANDOM community when I made a couple comments on a specific wiki a decade ago.
Also, Fandom got its start by taking advantage of the easy, permissive nature of CC licenses of major early wikis, including much of Fandom started as chunks of even Wikipedia itself that got excised for "relevance" or other "non-encylopedia" factors. Even in some of the cases where communities have decided to leave Fandom, Fandom believes it remains their right to scrape the community's new site and not need to include links back to the "real" home, so Fandom itself becomes an SEO disaster for the community. Even communities that had hoped to protect themselves from such situations by choosing a more restrictive CC license with the NC (Non Commercial) clause have been struggling with revoking Fandom's access to their content against Fandom's legal team saying that Fandom's commercial waver to the content was both retroactive and in perpetuity, and those wikis would have known that at the time.
Fandom is SEO spam infested with intrusive and obnoxious ads and is terrible at being an actual wiki. It fails at everything but co-opting community generated content to make money.
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