Forum:SH:Featured video testing

Hey everybody. If you follow the Fandom staff blog or noticed a Site Wide Message last week, you probably saw a blog called Intro to Wiki Modernization that I posted on Community Central. Check it out if you haven't already, but the basic premise is this: if we can put featured videos at the top of the most high traffic pages on Fandom, we can put valuable advertisements in front of those videos (like how ads play in front of YouTube videos). We can then use video ads, which are in high demand in the ad world, to remove other ads from wikis like Wookieepedia. Ads are consistently one of the biggest performance issues on Fandom, so the more we can do with video, the more ads we can remove. The more ads we can remove, the faster wiki pages will load and the better wiki pages will look.

Right now we're focused on running tests around the best way to use featured videos on the site. We're asking questions like, what's the best placement at the top of a page for a featured video player? How big should it be? What kind of videos do readers like the most?

We would like Wookieepedia to be one of the test wikis for this project. We would like your permission to run video tests on up to 10 of the most high traffic pages, using placement options like the one on Harry Potter Wiki's List of spells page. At any given these pages generally include topics like Snoke, Ahsoka Tano, Darth Maul, Anakin Skywalker, Kylo Ren, or Thrawn.

Videos will be added to top pages in the long-term, so the benefit to joining the test now is that you will be able to help shape what the final product looks like. Because while we know the placement will be somewhere at the top, we don't know what the exact final placement will be and what the video player will look like. That will be determined through studying the data from people readers who are watching the videos, as well as your feedback.

Here are answers to a few other questions you will likely have:


 * Can I see examples? You can see our initial featured video tests on four Harry Potter Wiki pages: List of spells, Hogwarts Houses, Newt Scamander, and Gellert Grindelwald. You will need to use Oasis (add ?useskin=wikia to the end of the URL), because...
 * Does this appear in Monobook? No, you will not see featured video in Monobook.
 * Will featured videos autoplay? Our long-term assumption is that, in order to get the high ad value needed to remove a lot of the ad clutter on wiki pages, we will need to use auto-play. However, we'll be testing both autoplay and non-autoplay featured videos throughout the testing process. Autoplay videos will not be auto-sound.
 * What will the featured videos be? Featured videos will be custom-made by Fandom staff, using different formats to see what users respond best to. The two formats we have worked with so far are character profiles (a quick overview of a character or subject) and listicle (10 Interesting Facts About X Character, for example). The pages we use will be chosen by Fandom's Content team based on traffic trends, but we would welcome suggestions from the community. Admins are also welcome to review scripts before we produce them, that way the admins can ensure that they are comfortable with the featured video before it goes live.
 * Will the featured videos be about the subject of the page? Yes. If Snoke has a featured video, the video will be about Snoke.
 * Will pages that test featured video have fewer ads? Not yet, since we're not currently in a position to begin removing any ad units. However, once we do decide which ad units will be removed, we are confident that they will be removed from every page on the wiki. This is despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of pages will ever have featured videos. That's how valuable video ads can be.

If Wookieepedia is on board to help shape what the final product will look like, we can begin producing videos pretty quickly and get some initial tests up and running. In all likelihood, Cavalier One and I will be the one to write the video scripts since we are both Fandom staff members and Wookieepedia editors. So once we have some of them written, we'll be able to send them to our video producers to put together.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to answer them. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 05:47, March 10, 2017 (UTC)