On Sep 2, 2015, at 11:17 AM, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which case we will have been spared a philosophical debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the wrong approach.
Debates about the Wikimedia ethos tend to be highly subjective and thus costly both in terms of time and emotional resources. Measuring whether banners work is fairly simple and objective. It makes sense to perform the cheapest prerequisite checks first, to minimize total cost.
Part of the cost of business in being transparent and actually _having_ an ethos is that these conversations need to be had, regardless of their cost.
And I seriously doubt that there's any benefit to these banner ads at all. Converting a small number of people from using the web version to an app version is meaningless when operating at this scale. We're actually probably _reducing_ the number of readers overall because many will simply say "screw this if you're serving me interstitials".
This was a bad idea. It remains a bad idea. It looks bad on the movement.
--- Brandon Harris :: bharris@gaijin.com :: made of steel wool and whiskey