TwilightSaga.com (2009–12): Fandom and the Lifespan of a Corporate Fan Site

Abstract

Building on the forms of digital participation enabled on RandomBuzzers website, such as peer-to-peer reviewing, peer-to-peer marketing, and consumer research, Chap. 4 presents a case study of Hachette’s The TwilightSaga (TwilightSaga.com, n.d.) site, which enabled all of these forms of participation, and in addition, channeled fan-fiction and other user-generated content to the publisher’s proprietary site. This study shows how Hachette used Twilight fandom, exemplified by readers’ participation on individual websites and blogs, by corralling it into a proprietary “digital enclosure” (Andrejevic, 2008) of user-generated content which the publisher, based on its end-user licensing agreements (EULAs), would then have rights to repurpose in any way. From a “Wild West” of independent Twilight fan sites on the web, to a more restrained culture governed by the EULAs, Hachette successfully created their site by emulating free sites on the web and branding them as “official,” turning “Edward” and “Jacob” based fan sites into groups called “Official Team Edward,” and “Official Team Jacob.” On the TwilightSaga site, readers were able to create their own Twilight identities. By commercializing fandom and extending Stephenie Meyer’s world-building onto a commercial website, Hachette could extend the brand and create further sources of revenue: peer-to-peer marketing; focus group research information; and user-generated content. The TwilightSaga site was studied from its earliest days around 2009 to 2012, after the books in the series had been published, and the movies were released. During this time, Hachette went from being intensely involved in the site to having less involvement, or interest in the site, as evidenced by reduced numbers of posts from the site owners, to fewer (and finally none) Q&A sessions with the author, and most interesting, to a lack of EULA enforcement, as evidenced by increased subversive behavior by site users.