Fan History is a collaborative project like none other currently serving the fandom community. Its core function is as a wiki which allows members of fandom - men and women, young and old - to actively participate in documenting the history of their various fandoms, share current news which may impact their experiences, as well as creating an easily searchable web indice of related communities, projects, and activities. It gives members of fandom a chance to share current fandom news that may impact people’s experiences in fandom. Fan History users can also promote their own creative projects, and share opinions with fellow fans and alert them to scams and questionable practices encountered within fandom. By providing these resources, Fan History allows users to celebrate their activities, whichever corner of fandom they come from: anime, cartoons, comics, movies, politics, science fiction, sports, television, theater, and video games.
The information that Fan History and its users have gathered allows the company’s staff to serve media companies by providing a consulting service and knowledge database for entertainment professionals and to academics.  We are uniquely positioned because as fans ourselves, we can provide context to all things fandom and explain what all the data and information on Fan History means to a company’s goals as they try to navigate the business end of fandom.

Fan History currently has no real direction competition: No one else is competing for the same audience, with the goal of creating a similar product across the broad base that Fan History has targeted.   Most of Fan History’s competitors are intending to create a community around a narrow audience, do not offer analysis for their information, focus on intellectual property for which copyright and trademark may be a concern, a not very usable for some one looking for a resource specifically aimed at a fandom audience or do not provide a service where the information can be explained as to how it matters to companies operating in that environment.

Specific Competitors
Fan History’s main product competes with a number of companies in a limited ways for audience share. In broad terms, these competitors are other wikis, and social networking communities and bookmarking sites. Fan History’s competition comes from companies operating in fan space and from fan run sites.

One wiki host which would compete with Fan History is Wikia, which does not offer consulting services and does not rely on users to gather information to help offer that service.   The information provided by Wikia is not organized around one central product but across over two hundred different wikis that deal with fandom.  The separate wikis they run have different organizational methods and different purposes regarding how they will focus on the fandom aspects of their canon universe.  Wet Paint would be another potential competitor for Fan History.  Its wikis are run by companies who outsource their wiki hosting to Wet Paint.  Their clients include CBS and Showtime.   Wet Paint’s wikis have similar issues to that of Wikia in what they offer in terms of providing information on one fandom at a time with out any unified organization across wikis and lack of fandom related data being provided on their wiki.  In addition, their wikis are at times less about hosting content than about forming a social community around the wiki.  Our competition also includes specific projects like SuperWiki, a Supernatural fandom wiki, and WikiFur, a wiki dedicated to furry fandom.  These focus on one fandom at a time and cater to a much narrower audience than Fan History is aiming for.  

Another Fan History competitor includes FanPop, which does not offer tools to allow easily for the coverage of fandom across social networks and to edit the information provided to discuss those communities. Digg, delicious and similar services would compete with Fan History.  These social bookmarking services act as indexes but are not a resource for which fandom could map on to easily because it does not allow the group to contribute additional information in an easily searchable way, nor do they offer fan friendly ways to organize their material. Fan History stands ready to compete with social bookmarking sites directly for fannish traffic with the inclusion of FanWorksFinder into the Fan History family.

Competitive Edge
Fan History’s advantages over its competitors include:

•  It covers multiple fandoms with similar formatting from fandom to fandom,

•  It is willing to work with intellectual property holders whose properties are featured in the product’s content.

•  It can work with all levels inside fandom, from large corporation to individual members of fandom.

•  It has a product where the content is all fandom related.

•  It can promote companies and individuals in the wiki with out disrupting the content in a way that would upset users.

•  It has staff and volunteers who have been active members of fandom for many years.

•  It has a product based off open source software which means updating the wiki will be cheaper than if Fan History was running its own custom built software.

Fan History is unique from many of its competitors because it is has less exposure to problems associated with intellectual property rights than other sites, which cater to fandom.  Fan History does not generally host that material, rather it points users to that content. Fan History’s current marketing strategy reflects that: It focuses on the fandom community, not the intellectual property.  This is then supported by Fan History administrators who de-emphasize articles which heavily focus on canon content to the exclusion or marginalization of  fandom community information.

Laura Hale. Fan History’s founder is Laura Hale.  She brings many years of experience of involvement in fandom as a historian, fan fiction archivist and analyst. The projects she has been involved with include FanFiction.Net, FanWorks.Org and FanDomination.Net. During the past year, she’s done consulting work where she has explained fandom’s culture and what it meant to the company she worked for.  Laura has recently attended RecentChangesCamp 2008 and Startup Weekend Ann Arbor. She has an MSEd in Instructional Technology from Northern Illinois University, has taught in a school and spent several years working in school libraries and computer labs.
Benajamin Lees.  Fan History’s technical support person is Benjamin Lees.  He has self taught himself how to run servers, support MediaWiki, and work on databases such as mySQL.  For Fan History, he has upgraded the MediaWiki software, advised on hosting solutions, installed a number of extensions, installed eAcclerator, memcache, Sphinx, worked on a search solution for the wiki and more.  Benjamin plans to attend University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Nicole Pellegrini.  Fan History’s support personnel specialist is Nicole Pellegrini.  She has been involved with fandom for many years as an archivist and doing community support by running mailing lists, ficathons and LiveJournal communities. In 2008, she created a wiki dedicated to The Police. Nicole Pellegrini has also been involved on the professional end of fandom as a dealer at conventions and as the maintainer of John Glover’s official site.  For Fan History, she assists in content creation, article formatting, policy advising and deals with administrative e-mail request from site visitors. She has a degree from MIT and does property management out of Philadelphia.