Hi. Today I'm writing a blog about the new ad formats that Wikia is implementing on wikis, since as usual Staff doesn't make announcements about such things.
I randomly switch my firefox to the private browsing, disabling the ad block plus, and browsing my home wiki to see what's going on.
That's what I found:
- Infolinks
Random words are changed to a clickable green link, that when hovered with the mouse pops an ad, totally unrelated BTW.
Do you remember Forum:Infolinks?
http://www.google.com/search?q=infolinks+site%3Awikia.com
- Slider ad
The same ad that is placed in the sidebar, at the top of the recent activity, when you scroll down the page, it randomly appears again over the floating toolbar, sliding up and down sometimes while you scroll. Now you can have a clue why Wikia has made the Oasis skin with that sidebar that goes empty when the sidebar modules ends. That's why the negative of Wikia of making the sidebar like a normal floating element which can make the content flow below the sidebar filling the entire space. No, because that empty space is for the ads!
And Wikia still say that Oasis wasn't made thinking of the ads.
This is not new, but maybe it's worth to mention: External links were linking to Special:outbound, that was an intermediate page for them. The system changed some weeks ago, and now when clicked a small in-page popup appears with an ad, and you need an additional click to skip the ad and open the new link. Of course, if you want to CTRL+Click the link to open in a new window it no longer works, because the ad is opened instead.
Happy Holydays!
20 dec 2010 update:
Some users alerted me about the impossibility to navigate through the wiki on Internet Explorer 8.
And I did a test. Installed Internet Explorer 8 in a new Windows XP, and recorded the experience for all of you:
First of all, I opened Internet Explorer (crearing all cookies and cache files) and went to http://es.pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/Rotom?noexternals=true . The noexternals=true in the URL makes the page to not load any external Javascript source (it's a "magic" parameter for Wikia, it won't work on other sites) and we can see that it loads in a reasonably time, giving that there were no file in the browser's cache. The page is loaded and you can interact with it. Then I remove the noexternals=true and then it comes the funny part: The browser eats the 100% of the CPU and doesn't let you do anything with it, nor scroll the page.
No need to see the entire video, it's like 5 minutes since the page is opened without the noexternals=true and the CPU is stable at 100% without any way of interaction. At the end, the page is fully loaded and you can see the infolinks and the slider ad in all its glory — of course if you haven't killed the IE process before!