The reply every year is that the banners are keyed for maximum effectiveness, even if they are intrusive, in order to make the overall fundraising drive as short as possible. Fundraising has made small tweaks to various banners, but generally have not been willing to significantly reduce the effectiveness of the ads in order to appease Wikimedians... who are - lets be honest - not a large portion of the target population.

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

On 2 December 2015 at 16:37, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:

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.

[[WP:BEANS]] comes to mind, don't say that too loudly and give anyone ideas!

Although I have been pleasantly surprised at the content (if not the size) of the ads so far this year.

Cheers, Craig

No, I was referring to the lack of misleading scare messages; the current one is a little wishy-washy for my taste but at least it's not implying that the Foundation is in grave financial danger. Obviously the use of what might be paid stock art where there is plenty of free alternatives available on our own projects is not ideal. The ads themselves are also as ugly as hell, although I'm sure there's some A/B testing that shows that such monstrosities extract slightly more cash from the readers that will be used to justify that.

Cheers, Craig

On 3 December 2015 at 10:01, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:

On 3 Dec 2015 10:25 am, "Craig Franklin" cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:

...

On 2 December 2015 at 16:37, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:

...

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.

[[WP:BEANS]] comes to mind, don't say that too loudly and give anyone

ideas!

...

Although I have been pleasantly surprised at the content (if not the

size)

...

of the ads so far this year.

You approve of WMF using stock photos?

-- John