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@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@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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-- Seddon
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