User:M.mendel/Why Oasis

This page is meant to be included in various places.

Why I would invest in Oasis if I was Wikia
I am not Wikia; I'm not employed by them and have no inside knowledge. However, I have wondered why Wikia has invested considerable resources into their new skin project. When asked, "why the new skin", the answer is usually some vague waffling about user experience and moving with the times. If I was Wikia, I'd invest in a change like that for my bottom line. Here's how the most marked changes affect it.

Behaviour tracking boosts ad sales
Targetted advertisements can be sold for twice as much as normal ads. Wikia hides most tools in dropdowns; the ones still in the open are "share" and "follow"; both indicate what a user likes, and some ad networks are able to track clicks to these links and correlate them with page content to get a picture of the reader's interests. ("Google also plans to go head-to-head with Facebook's "Like" button—a tiny tool on many websites that lets people tell friends they "like" something. Each click gives Facebook valuable, personal data about people's interests." ) An added benefit might be that the "cleaner" page helps behaviour analysis algorithms to more easily filter out unimportant clicks.

Increase time spent on Wikia
The "Wikia rail" at the top might help people who get bored with one Wiki to stay longer on Wikia, exploring other wikis. This increases a metric that is important for advertisers: the time spent on the site (site being Wikia). It makes Wikia appear more attractive to users, and allows it to serve more page views and helps sell ads.

Remove in-content ads
Advertisers demand the box ad in the upper right corner; on the other hand, it is possible that Wikia research found that in-content ads are now less effective than they were thought to be when introduced. Integrating the box ad in a right sidebar solves this. ( somethingawful.com had this 2 years ago! )

Caching
I'd put everything that's personalized into widgets that get loaded via Ajax; that way, I could cache the same version of any page for everyone and let the browser create the personal links and load the personal tools separately (only one load for each user, from then on out it's in the browser cache). Normal Widgets such as the shoutbox would have to go; they can't be cached as part of the page.

It seems that despite "hiding" the personal stuff, Wikia isn't doing it that way (yet), with the personalization still being provided by the server as part of the page.