Buy outs

 "Our intention is to reduce the commercialism of the site, not increase it."
 * -- Jim Wales, founder of Wikia, on the Guildwars wikia in 2007, the next year wikia rolled out Monaco for better advertising revenue, and two years after that, Wikia skin, for advertising revenue.

"If these images (showing an editor is being "compensat(ed) ... somewhere around a quarter of a million") are valid, then our number 1 priority is to get as much of the guildwiki data off the servers as possible for a fork. Wikia may buy off one person, but they cannot buy a community." -- Editor about the Guildwars buy out. If you are a member of a large wikia, and the veteran editors are unwilling to leave, the reason maybe that they have been paid, or are being paid ongoing advertising revenue.

Wikia regularly buys out wikis, giving core editors thousands of dollars to join wikia.

Which poses the question: Do the leaders of your wikia site have the communities best interest in mind?

Guildwiki
From:

$62,000 and $3,000 in stock for gamewikis, (see the leaked contract below)

User:GraveWit answering questions:


 * First Things First: Are You Getting Paid For This


 * Short answer: Yes.


 * Long answer: Wikia gave me some cash and company stock in exchange for all of the related GameWikis URLs, a data dump of all of our content, and the discontinuation of my hosting of the sites. As you're probably aware, GameWikis has had suitors before. This is truly not about the money.


 * Contract

World of Warcraft
The original owners of WoWWiki were given money to come to Wikia initially, they are long since gone and no one remaining in the admin staff (of Wowpedia) was part of that pay-off. Pcj 18:33, November 30, 2010 (UTC)

Since WoWWiki forked to Wowpedia, Wikia Staff has hired a paid volunteer to try to keep pages up to date, since all active admins left to Wowpedia.
 * This is exactly why we hired Raylan13, an active WoW player, to focus only on WoWWiki, primarily on the addition, organization and maintenance of Cataclysm articles.

Battlestar
Offered "$2,500 up front payment or 30% in advertising revenues." by Angela Beesey.

Bulbapedia
Forum postings about Wikia trying to buy out "Bulbapedia":

An alleged email from Angela Beesey.