On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Brandon Harris bharris@gaijin.com wrote:
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".
Agree that that's a downside that needs to be considered, for any banner actually (be it an invitation to install an app, to donate, or to participate in a photo contest). On the other hand, we may very well also be losing many readers by inactivity here, because they would prefer to read Wikipedia in an app and are not aware of ours. See e.g. the recently posted results from the strategy consultation https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/27/strategy-potential-mobile-multimedia-translation/ :
*"Mobile-related comments reveal an opportunity to improve our existing mobile offerings for both editors and readers and raise awareness about our native apps. Participants (mostly anonymous users) urged us to 'make an app,' when one is already available for iOS and Android devices."*
(there's more detail in this slide https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2015_Strategy_Consultation_Report.pdf&page=44 )
BTW, since we are talking about the impact on Finnish Wikipedia users, the link to the community notification there: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kahvihuone_(uutiset)#Running_banner_... It doesn't show any discussion so far; has there been feedback from Finnish readers in other venues?