Wikia is a popular content sharing site that lets its community create Wiki’s on any topic for free. What you might not know about Wikia is that it has quickly become the number two destination on the web for gaming content based on traffic stats reported by comScore. The site just hopped past GameSpot and now sits behind IGN.

Overall, the site saw pretty impressive growth in 2011 and sports some eye-catching numbers:

Nearly 50 million global unique visitors/month
Over 850 million page views/month
42% traffic growth year-over-year

If you haven’t heard of Wikia, you’ve probably landed on one of its sites while googling something. In the same way that Wikipedia lets its community create and collaborate on content, Wikia does the same with more of a focus on entertainment and pop culture. In fact, the company is the for-profit arm of Wikipedia, founded by Jimmy Wales. What the company couldn’t have seen coming is the massive usage it gets for gaming content covering every platform from Atari to Xbox.

In December 2011, Wikia’s gaming traffic jumped 50.7% and totaled 25.7M unique visitors. Those numbers were good enough to put it into the number two spot for gaming networks on the web. With IGN sitting at number one, Wikia decided to poach two of its top editors.

Hilary Goldstein and Eric Moro are joining Wikia to focus solely on its Gaming property. The two are big losses for IGN, as Goldstein served as Editor-in-Chief of IGN Games, and Moro was Editor-in-Chief of IGN’s Movies site. Combined, the two have fifteen years of experience at IGN and should help turn Wikia into the number one gaming destination on the web.

Wikia’s CEO, Craig Palmer, sees content partners being its top focus right now:

Eric and Hilary are visionaries with a finger on the pulse of these highly engaged audiences. We’re just beginning to really scratch the surface on how brands and our users can work together, and they will be instrumental in curating and surfacing these new experiences for users and industry partners.

When it comes to community generated content, curation is the key to make the content available to visitors. Wikia has done a fantastic job of curating the content that its community has made, and my only knock on them is that the ads on the site can sometimes be a bit obnoxious. I completely understand that you need to make money when having a free site, but I’m hopeful that the two new hires will help build relationships with advertisers who don’t want to buy flashing banners.