

Optimizing Wikipedia's Fundraising Banner Ads - sax
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/12/11/annual-fundraiser-checking-banner-results/

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philwelch
I've found them far more obnoxious over time, personally. As the first
commenter notes, this is also a legitimate concern--but there's no easy metric
for obnoxiousness. (Clicks on the "hide" button perhaps?)

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stingraycharles
Yes there is: measure the frequencies each banner is shown to each visitor and
add that data to your optimization parameters. Of course this requires you to
identify and track each individual visitor, but it's a standard practice in
online ad systems.

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saperduper
I have written a blog post on this with detailed explanation of the 'anchoring
heuristic'.

[http://saperduper.org/post/293243288/wikipedia-donators-
anch...](http://saperduper.org/post/293243288/wikipedia-donators-anchoring-
heuristic)

I also posted it on HN <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007587>

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drtse4
This made me think to "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely too, quite a good
example of the anchoring phenomenon.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html)
Btw, i agree with those that says that is quite hard to come to any meaninful
conclusion just using the average and max donation, why not analyze also the
median value or the std dev/complete donations distribution?

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breckinloggins
I still don't understand why Google doesn't just support Wikipedia. That whole
"knowl" thing didn't work out that well... it would almost be a feel-good
thing for them. Hell, google.org could do it on behalf of the parent
corporation as a charity move.

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joshu
a) statistical significance?

b) average is probably not as good a measure as median, since I doubt it's
normally distributed.

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gojomo
Are these banners really better than advertising? (What revenue would half the
pixels, devoted to tasteful ads instead of a pledge drive, yield?)

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cedsav
It's a non-profit. They're not interested in maximizing revenues.

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CapitalistCartr
Non-profit has nothing to do with revenue. Every non-profit that survives has
to consider revenue carefully and improve efficiencies.

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mcav
Particularly ones that require a lot of infrastructure and maintenance to keep
running. (servers)

