- McDonald's paid Fandom to replace Grimace's wiki page with an advert.
- It followed a huge marketing campaign celebrating the character's birthday.
McDonald's upset the creator of a wiki page about its character Grimace by paying the site hosts to replace it with an ad.
McDonald's paid Fandom — which hosts the McDonald's wiki — to replace Grimace's page with an ad tied to its promotion campaign around the character.
But fans who curated the bio in the first place weren't impressed.
The person who wrote most of the page, digital marketer and writer Nathan Steinmetz, told gaming news site Kotaku that the change "sets a really bad precedent."
McDonald's released "Grimace's Birthday Meal," including purple milkshake, on June 12 to celebrate the character's apparent birthday, and the furry purple mascot took the internet by storm. People made cartoons and memes and got tattoos in honor of him, Insider's Chris Panella reported.
He's become a firm fan favorite despite nobody really knowing what he is (Insider previously reported a McDonald's manager said he is actually a "taste bud").
That's why Steinmetz put in so many hours over the years on the Grimace page for the McDonald's Fandom site, an unofficial wiki page that celebrates the fast-food company and its lore.
(While wikis are a style of website where anybody can edit, most have nothing to do with Wikipedia, the most famous wiki site.)
"McDon*ld's took over the Grimace wiki page and removed all the real world information, appearances, and citations that I've added over the years," he tweeted on June 17, saying his Grimace biography had been turned into a huge ad.
The edit history for the Grimace page showed a major change on June 14, accompanied with the note "switching over entirety of grimace article at mcdonald's request, just for the length of this campaign in 2023."
After several more edits, an administrator locked the page until July 10.
"Like I can just add it back but what's the point if they're literally paying a dude to undo it," Steinmetz said. "They're partnering with Fandom for an ad campaign for the page now too."
—Nathan (@Humanstein) June 17, 2023
He said what used to be a "goofy fun space on the internet" was now "just a straight up ad." A disclaimer at the end of the page now states that it "is sponsored by McDonald's."
Steinmetz said he had been informed the change was temporary, but objected all the same.
"Think they should have just cleaned up what was there and added some copy about this promo," he said.
Steinmetz's tweet was liked over 40,000 times and shared by other fans who were also upset. "They are defiling the sacred text of Grimace lore," one person said.
Steinmetz told Kotaku in a statement that wikis are "a bastion of the old internet where people get together to share information simply for the sake of it."
"Unfortunately that is not directly monetizable," he said. "While The Grimace is a very silly page for this to whole thing to be about, I think it probably sets a really bad precedent that an IP holder can approach Fandom or whoever and have user generated content basically 'suppressed' and replaced with a press release."
He said he knew it sounded "dramatic" to "talk about the suppression of Grimace lore," but he, and many others, use Fandom wiki pages quite religiously to read about everything pop culture related from movies, to games, to comics.
"If you want the rundown on the continuity of Doctor Who audio dramas or all the pop culture references in an episode of the Venture Bros you pretty much have to go to a Fandom wiki," he said. "I think these wikis are an incredibly important resource and it just feels really gross that any company can step in and do that."
Insider reached out to McDonald's for comment.