Hey Pine,
Communicating about testing is something we need to work out how to
improve. One of the issues is the sheer volume of content we are dealing
with. During these early days our banner team is running about 7 tests a
day, and we have already tested 66 banners and counting. That doesn't
include all of the prototype work in design process and since tuesday
nearly 200 banners have been created.
Some ideas are ones that you've been sitting on saving up for big english,
others are ones you dig out of the closet based on new information, then
there are tests that are done on the fly in reaction to the recent results
that take your course in a whole different trajectory and many (often the
unexpected successes and often the bolder choices) are the ones that that
are spur of the moment.
To be fair this was more in the second category. We tried it once earlier
in the year and we suspected it was something we would revisit. In this
instance we probably could have flagged it up sooner. But running such test
is still valuable information, it allows for an informed discussion. It
should be noted that the fundraising team isn't directly purely by
fundraising success rates. Through the design process we filter out many of
the more... shall we say... bolder banners. Even when some of the bolder
actions that do get tested and have been highly successful, a decision has
been made to put the idea to one side.
And in this instance although the test was successful, we had decided that
although a winner, it was the lessons to take away that were more
important. From there we hope to arrive at a banner that draws from the
success but is delivered in a way that is easier on the eye. And as always
we are definitely interested in hearing feedback on such efforts. It does
genuinely guide our work even if it may not appear to.
Regards
Seddon
On Fri, Dec 2, 2016 at 3:17 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've been thinking about these inline ads since I
first encountered one,
which I believe was either yesterday or today. I'm uncomfortable with the
idea of inline ads, but they seem to be clearly delineated from article
content, and as far as I can tell there is simply no easy way to do on-wiki
fundraising without a certain amount of distraction to the reader. I don't
like this practice, but it's hard for me to say that I dislike it any more
than massive banners. Until WMF has such a large endowment that it no
longer needs to do online fundraising (which would create a different set
of financial accountability problems than we have now; maybe or maybe not
more or less, but different) I'm reluctantly willing to go along with the
program. If people have some convincing reasons why inline fundraising
should not happen, I hope that they will speak up. At the moment I think
it's OK to go with the flow.
In the future I would suggest that this kind of change should be
communicated ahead of time, on this mailing list and elsewhere. (Unless I
missed it, which would be my fault.
Thanks,
Pine
On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Joseph Seddon <jseddon(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hey Geni,
So this is a style of banner that we have used on mobile over the last
year. We have previously had good feedback about the mobile version with
people feeling it was less obtrusive to the reader experience. This
banner
that you saw was one of our first attempts at
seeing whether transferring
this to desktop was even a viable idea.
That test showed this design had a huge amount of potential from a
fundraising point of view, between a 60% & 90% increase in donations.
However we felt that the banner wasn't quite providing the same
experience
as we were getting on mobile. The size was larger
and so we think that we
can refine the concept so that it remains effective but making it less
intrusive both than it’s current form and our current control banner (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein?banner=B1617_
1117_en6C_dsk_p2_sm_template&force=1&country=US).
We are working a number of smaller versions that are a little more in
keeping with the experience provided on mobile, so keep in mind this is
far
from a finished version.
I would like to emphasis that we are not committed to this. It's
certainly
a change from what we have had in the past and,
based on that, both I and
my colleagues would genuinely like to hear people's views on this type of
banner. For now this banner will be limited to testing and our current
small banner (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein?banner=B1617_
1117_en6C_dsk_p2_sm_template&force=1&country=US)
will be remaining our control. We would like to do a few more tests with
an
improved take on this style and I would be happy
to share the outcomes of
those if it would help inform the discussion.
Regards
Seddon
On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 8:56 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Screenshot of what I mean:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Inline_donor_bannerbass.png
Inline ads are generally considered to be something that gets into
scummy advertising territory (for example even adblock plus's rather
questionable Acceptable Ad policy doesn't accept them).
On a related note the FAQ appears to be out of date:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en
Unless we are still in the 2015-2016 fiscal year.
--
geni
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