Bohdan Melnychuk wrote:
Yeah ad is the word. We claim Wikipedia being ad-less but actually we are showing people stuff which only in deep sense is different from ads but looks exactly the same. Or, actually, in this case it looks worse. I really have a difficulty recalling a site which shows me so little content initially because the rest is covered in ads. This all went too far and I hope that Fundraising guys think of less haunting way of calling for donation.
Yes, it's definitely an advertisement. Adblock and others should treat it as such. I don't think this ad is haunting, though. I'm a little sad that when I clicked the Imgur link, I actually expected worse.
Sadly, other sites can be more obnoxious. Some sites have interstitial advertisements that include auto-playing video. The Wikimedia Foundation has not yet sunk to that yet.
Samuel Klein wrote:
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.
I don't have much to add to what SJ wrote recently in a related thread.
MZMcBride