Forum:Introducing a new video test

Hi everyone. I'm Brandon from Fandom's Community Support team. Starting today, we are running a test for 4-5 weeks on Harry Potter Wiki about video engagement on wiki articles. Thank you to admins Seth Cooper, ProfessorTofty, and Cavalier One for being so helpful as we got this test up and running!

You may have read our Community Central blog series last week about ads on Fandom (if not, check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). In that series, we talked about how we want to start removing a lot of the ads that you see on every page. The way to do that is to replace them with more high quality and "high impact" ads, which means we could have fewer ads as long as the ads that we do have are more visible (you can read more about that in our ad blog series). We believe that having more video content on the site, with ads that play in front of the videos (like how it works on YouTube), is one of the ways we can do that, but first we need to see how many people would actually watch highly-visible videos on wikis.

This is the first wiki where we have run this test, and we're thrilled to be able to work with you as we begin to learn more about how we can clean up ads on Fandom.

Why is video content a good idea?
The internet is constantly evolving, and so are its users and their needs. Research shows that a lot of people prefer watching a short video over just reading a long article, or even to get additional information from videos while reading a page's text. We think that having video content in addition to the great textual content already available on Fandom will attract even more readers, and that the ads in front of those videos will help us clean up the overall ad experience on the site.

How will this test work?
Our X-Wing Team, the Fandom Product team working on this project, will place a video on 4 pages, and each page will have its own video about the subject of the page. The video will be at the top of the page so it's visible when the page loads. The placement of the video will change throughout the test so we can see what part of the page helps the video get the most amount of views.

Starting today, we are running the first test on the Gellert Grindelwald page. We have embedded a video from YouTube to get some initial data about which video placement works best. That will affect the look of the page as we change the placement throughout the test.

Next week, we are going to begin an expanded test using videos created by our own video team. We will be doing a character profile on the Newton Scamander page, a Top 5 Best Spells video on List of spells, and then a video on either Horcrux or Hogwarts Houses. These are all in the Top 10 pages on the wiki, and each one represents a different type of page that may give us unique data about video engagement.

Now that the test is live, we want to hear from you too. What do you think the best placement is for a video on the page? Do you like the idea of having video on pages, including to help remove other ads? Tell us your thoughts! - Brandon Rhea (talk) 17:02, January 28, 2017 (UTC)