[Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Zack Exley]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Zack Exley wrote:
> > In past years, the campaign has dragged on for weeks with us only making
> > $150,000 per day. We wanted to avoid that this year, and so we did
> > everything we could to get the money in fast, so that we weren't
> littering
> > the sites with banners for little return.
>
> Thank you for the very detailed reply. I'm highlighting just this paragraph
> to say thank you to the fundraising team again for all of its work to
> reduce
> the time the banners spend on the site. This is fantastic. :-)
>
> In previous discussions, there were questions about trade-offs and I think
> you mentioned that the Wikimedia community would have to make some choices
> about certain implementation details (e.g., "stickiness" of banners) after
> evaluating the cost of these features (annoyance to readers and editors)
> versus their benefit (increase in donations, decrease in fundraising banner
> time, etc.). I realize it's January and that the next annual fundraiser is
> many months away, but do you have any idea when this year you'll be having
> a
> discussion about these trade-offs and where?
>

Any suggestions about how that might best be done? There are so few people
who participate on this list that I would say this isn't a good place to
measure the feelings of either WM contributions or readers.

There's also the problem of people not necessarily knowing what actually
annoys them or interferes with their experience the most when it's being
discussed in the abstract.

And surveys of course have their problems.

Moreover, what are the important questions? What do some editors find
objectionable from an aesthetic point of view? (Even though we are now
sparing logged in users completely.) What gets in the way of readers' use
of the site? Or other more nuanced questions about readers' reactions? For
example, do some choices cause readers to perceive banners as ads, cause
confusion or possibly reduce readership?

Any thoughts?




>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
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-- 
Zack Exley
Chief Revenue Officer
Wikimedia Foundation