Forum:Ad experiment

Hi all,

I would guess that most of you reading this message are logged in, and so don't see the site ads... but I wanted to tell you about an experiment we are running with the ads here. Instead of the usual box ads, we are trying out info-links. These are the double underlined links you see on some sites, which lead to an ad related to the linked word. We would like to see whether people find them less or more intrusive on the articles than in-article boxes, and whether they will actually get used by visitors and so whether they would be a viable alternative to the usual ads. So, your opinions would be great.. and we also need to gather some practical data from the visitors on the site as they are show the different type of ads (we will compare the results with other similar wikis to see what actually happens when they are shown). Depending on what data we get, the change is likely to be in place for about 2 months.

You should be able to see the change sometime tomorrow... Let me know what you think!

Thanks, -- sannse (talk) 22:36, April 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * Won't that interfere with the regular links? Glorious  CHAOS!  23:29, April 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * Ditto on that. Say you linked "Digimon Frontier" to, well, some place selling box sets.  Or video games.  It might break the internal links.
 * They won't affect regular links. The way it's set, if a word is already linked, then it won't get a double-underline. -- sannse (talk) 17:47, April 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, personally, I believe they break the flow of the article. Unlike blue-links which are expected, and unlike ads which are localized, these need to be somehow stand out to be seen, and it impacts the page's formatting with wrong-looking links.  Especially if they're the ones which pop up a new ad box when you scroll over. Lanate (talk) 04:58, April 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Look at LoaderLiomon while logged out. It links to "Digimon", pointing to the deficient Wikipedia page, and "Power", pointing to an IBM ad. While the ads aren't as disruptive to the overall layout as the boxes, they don't go away when you move to something else, which seems like it could cause the user to try closing the ad, and accidentally hitting a blue link (I know the Table of contents to the left is incredibly annoying without auto-close, and has caused me to lose my edits several times by accidentally clicking on it.)
 * I'm not exactly sure what to suggest, but it's clear there are still major problems.128.211.165.25 19:14, April 22, 2010 (UTC)