Proposal:Micro advertisement box
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
Allowed strictly controlled (grayscale, small size, no animations, optable out) non distracting advertisement area in Wikipedia side bar.
Proposal
Allow one grayscale, unanimated ad that would show below Wikipedia logo image, being exactly the same width and half of the height. The company could tie the ad to the page or category of pages, specifying the target audience more precisely. Registered users should have right to opt out the ad but the ad would be on by default.
The ads should be storable in Wikipedia space, not allowing indirect ways to gather statistics by violating user privacy.
Motivation
This ad likely would not disturb readers so much and still generate some profit. It should disappear immediately when the user starts editing session. It may be kind of compromising solution between people who agree with ads and people who do not.
The most important task in this project is to find and place firm restrictions that would not allow to increase size, number and aggressive behavior (like flashing) of ads, understanding that ad placers will want this and will press on this. This must be firmly set in some official rules If they will say they do not want a highly restricted ad, up to them.
The ad so restricted would likely generate much less profit than it would be possible but will not distract people from working. From the other side, a not so big profit would limit the influence of ad provider.
Key Questions
- Do we need ads? Can we perfectly proceed with voluntary donations? If the answer is yes, vote zero and forget about this proposal.
- How to prevent the djinni coming out of the bottle? Companies for sure will press on increasing size of the ad, allowing animations and in general doing everything that increases the click rate. Many sites that start putting ads soon place them in such amounts that the content becomes barely readable.
- Would so restricted ad generate a reasonable profit? If it would not, the idea should be dropped rather than allowing to make the add more noticeable.
- Putting even such ad may reduce the amount of donations because people will think that Wikipedia in now funded by the ad. Some survey should likely be posted to check if this may happen or not.
- Last time we even discussed ads the community split and we lost a lot of editors, is there a risk that this would happen again?
Potential Costs
References
Community Discussion
Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Micro advertisement box.
See Also
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