Joseph Seddon wrote:
We are coming up to that time of year again with the launch of our English fundraiser. Our E-mail campaign is already underway and in a little under three weeks time, the banner campaign will launch in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland on Giving Tuesday [1], November 29, 2016. We will continue to try and limit the disruption from these banners. Our current expectation is to run our banners for all traffic for the first two weeks. Following that we will some combination of either reducing the amount of traffic being shown banners or the number of times a banner is shown to each user.
Thanks for this e-mail. I have a number of questions. I can post these on a talk page or elsewhere if that's better. For now, they're below.
Is there a place to see what the 2016 advertisements will look like and how they will behave? Some of the strongest objections in past years have come from the fact that these ads have stopped being 1-inch banners on desktop and instead consume the entire screen. Readers can get confused and think that they need to pay in order to read Wikipedia, when this is obviously not the case. When an advertisement consumes the whole viewing area, obfuscating the page content and demanding money, I think it's reasonable to assume that some of our millions of readers will mistake the ad for ransomware.
Where can the upcoming ad creatives be seen? I'd like to know if they'll be explicit about being able to simply dismiss the ad.
How long will dismissing the ad be effective for? Two weeks? Longer?
Will the ads be reasonable in size and in content? The other recurring criticism for these ads has been deceptive and misleading text. Sometimes we've even been simply wrong. I'd like to avoid any repeats of that.
And finally, as a show of good will and good faith to our editors, in past years we have not targeted these ads at logged-in users. Will logged-in users be targeted for ads in this upcoming fund-raising drive?
MZMcBride