User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Ad Tests on Fandom/@comment-4864110-20170427193358/@comment-20644-20170427210609

That type of ad is important to our business due to its visibility and impact, but we want to make sure that it's not impacting page performance. Page performance is far and away the thing that people cite as their biggest issue with the ad experience right now.

Currently, combing an ad like that with many of the programmatic ads (ad units in the right rail and on the bottom of the page) can lead to a clunky experience. Our goal is to clean up a lot of the programmatic ad units, which is what these tests are for, so page performance improves. And so pages just look better in general. That's a pretty good trade off.

We've heard good feedback from wikis about some of the banner ads that specifically expand and contract too, and we're thinking about how those work and what our approach will be on those moving forward. That includes "ads that appear like 10 seconds after everything else," leading to misclicks. That is not an ideal ad experience.