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