On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 5:56 PM, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thank you for the update and all the hard work the team has done during Q1. My comments below.
Thanks likewise, Megan. I'm always impressed by your team's work.
Better performing banners are required to raise a higher budget with declining traffic. We’ll continue testing
new
banners into the next quarter and sharing highlights as we go.
I think a more pressing response to this is to reduce the budget to get some breathing room, increase work through partnerships (which Wikimedia doesn't have to fund entirely on its own), and increase non-banner revenue streams.
It's also key to improve banner effectiveness. How nice it would be to have a composite that combines measures of the favorability of the banner among readers (most of whom don't donate anyway), mood setting & meme propagation, and the reduction in usability of the site (which may have an effect over months), against the immediate fundraising impact. A banner that is 5% better with improved favorability among readers may be better than a banner that is 20% better but with double the unfavorability.
There are thousands of worthy projects that have expanded their budgets as far as they could, then expand in-your-face banners as far as they can, and only stop once their sites are quite difficult to use. It happens gradually (I'm looking at you, Wikia ;) but the result is the usability equivalent of linkrot. Let's not let WP end up like that.
Sam