[Wikimedia-l] fundraising test absurdly successful but still huge room for improvement

[David Cuenca]

That is a great improvement, BUT
http://xkcd.com/605/

That the experiment reached 100k per day doesn't mean that it will sustain
for the whole year, or that the pool of donors is large enough to reach the
endowment needs. Don't get me wrong, I hope your predictions are accurate,
just let's not get disappointed if the results don't match them.

As for some proposals to improve the fundraising experience, I loved the
Ubuntu donation screen that appears when you download the iso:
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/questions?distro=desktop&bits=32&release=latest

Besides of providing a neat interface, it lets you allocate funds, sort of
"voting" with your donation :)

Micru

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 8:07 AM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

> In the last week, the current fundraising test has stabilized at about
> $100,000 per day from showing the latest banners one time (per cookie)
> to 5% of logged out enwiki readers. It was falling from larger amounts
> during July 1st-10th, but at that time the banner was being offered to
> 5% of all page views, not 5% of IP addresses, so eventually everyone
> logged out was seeing them until that was fixed. The data is at
> http://frdata.wikimedia.org/
>
> That is quite a bit more than ever before. It represents a sustained
> capability of $2 million per day from enwiki alone, or probably at
> least $3 million per day from all projects. That would probably be
> enough to raise a full endowment in less than a year, or an endowment
> matching recent growth rates (not counting the last two years'
> slowdowns) in less than two years.
>
> However, we should still do multivariate testing of the remaining
> untested ~300 banner messages, because the variance of the tested
> messages (a minority of those submitted years ago) suggests that
> there's still an undiscovered ~2.5x improvement over the current
> message available from altering the goal statement in the main ask
> sentence in the current banners.
>
> On a likely related note, there has been no slowdown in the growth of
> the short popular vital articles, on a byte-per-time basis. They still
> continue to grow at about 4 bytes per day each. This has been constant
> for so long that I am beginning to think that the apparent reduction
> in the number of active editors (actually, active accounts) must be
> illusory as the growth and stabilization of controversial articles and
> topics reduces the motivation for editors to create replacement or
> alternate accounts.
>
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