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Obamas audience was massive. Millions and millions of people. I believe that's representative of the general taste of people.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
True, but extrapolating this single test with a particular audience looking for a particular type of information and being presented with these particular images and videos out to all websites is probably not the wisest thing.
- maxklein 16y ago
  Of course, that's true, but we can't test EVERYTHING. If a very large test has been made with a very general population, then I think one should just make the assumption that will work similarly on your audience. If we start testing everything, we'll just be stuck testing the whole time! There are an infinite number of things to test, if there is a large and credible study showing one particular thing to be true, and no "anti" study, then I will just accept it and not retest it. Rather, I test things unique to my product or presentation. Running a test, particularly a multivariate test is not an easy or quick task. It requires a lot to do it properly, and if I had to do hundreds of them, I'd be wasting a lot of time. Most times as a small company, one should not be focusing on if a button is red or green, but on if you are at all in the right business. Such small-scale and detailed testing is really a way to stick your head in the sand, when larger optimisations or corrections could lead to a much much bigger jump.
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I get what you're saying, and you're not wrong in general, but in this specific case, there are plenty of counter-examples. For example, there's an awful lot of affiliate marketers out there who have found that video squeeze pages convert at a much higher rate than text squeeze pages. And they only know that because they tested the shit out of the options, not because they prefer one over the other. I hate watching a 5-minute video when I could skim-read a 30-second block of text instead. But I'm not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. And specifically as it relates to text over video, a huge number of people are finding that video converts better than text for their audience. YMMV.
    - Flenser 16y ago
      >I hate watching a 5-minute video when I could skim-read a 30-second block of text instead. But it may be that even if the majority of people feel like that the people that will watch the video will convert better than the people that will read or skim-read a block of text.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago

True, but extrapolating this single test with a particular audience looking for a particular type of information and being presented with these particular images and videos out to all websites is probably not the wisest thing.

maxklein 16y ago
Of course, that's true, but we can't test EVERYTHING. If a very large test has been made with a very general population, then I think one should just make the assumption that will work similarly on your audience. If we start testing everything, we'll just be stuck testing the whole time! There are an infinite number of things to test, if there is a large and credible study showing one particular thing to be true, and no "anti" study, then I will just accept it and not retest it. Rather, I test things unique to my product or presentation. Running a test, particularly a multivariate test is not an easy or quick task. It requires a lot to do it properly, and if I had to do hundreds of them, I'd be wasting a lot of time. Most times as a small company, one should not be focusing on if a button is red or green, but on if you are at all in the right business. Such small-scale and detailed testing is really a way to stick your head in the sand, when larger optimisations or corrections could lead to a much much bigger jump.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I get what you're saying, and you're not wrong in general, but in this specific case, there are plenty of counter-examples. For example, there's an awful lot of affiliate marketers out there who have found that video squeeze pages convert at a much higher rate than text squeeze pages. And they only know that because they tested the shit out of the options, not because they prefer one over the other. I hate watching a 5-minute video when I could skim-read a 30-second block of text instead. But I'm not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. And specifically as it relates to text over video, a huge number of people are finding that video converts better than text for their audience. YMMV.
  - Flenser 16y ago
    >I hate watching a 5-minute video when I could skim-read a 30-second block of text instead. But it may be that even if the majority of people feel like that the people that will watch the video will convert better than the people that will read or skim-read a block of text.