Social Sharing Icons Beneath ALL the ads on the right side now?

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   ChristinSposted 9 years ago

   I went to share a fellow hubbers hub and had to hunt for the buttons in order to share.  There were at the very bottom of the right hand side.  Then I checked one of my own hubs - all the way at the bottom.  Not helpful, especially when many of us rely primarily on social media for our traffic.  People who come here and are not overly familiar with HP will likely never see them in that position.
   
   You don't even see them until you scroll all the way to the bottom of the comments.  Wow - that's just terrible I'm sorry.  I'm not one to grumble and fuss around here and appreciate the hard work that goes into this site, but that is terrible placement for social media icons, particularly for those of us who get a lot of our traffic from social media. 
   
   You guys should be making it easier to share and encouraging sharing for all our sakes.

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      Christy Kirwanposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      We agree, and we do have plans to move the sharing buttons once we've finished testing ad layouts.

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         susi10posted 9 years agoin reply to this

         Oh, that's great! My social traffic has dropped drastically in the last week, and I'm thinking that the social sharing buttons being underneath the ads had a huge impact.
         
         But at least, that'll change.
         Thanks for bringing this up Christin! And thanks Christy for the quick answer!

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         LongTimeMotherposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         And the testing of ad layouts will take how long, Christy? This problem has been discussed on the forums for quite a while.
         
         Surely it would be relatively simple to just move the share icons to immediately beneath the thumbs up, thumbs down etc ... a logical and obvious place ... until such time as you want to try out another idea.
         
         Because share buttons help drive outside traffic to hp, it would seem to be in everyone's best interest to have the problem addressed promptly. Unless you are suggesting (and I really hope you're not) that hp would rather not make sharing more accessible until such time as you get your ad layouts sorted.
         
         Sharing should be a decision made based on the content of the hub ... not influenced by which ad happens to appear above or below it. Someone reads a hub, and gets a chance to immediately respond to it. (By voting, sharing etc.) 
         
         Making readers go in search of the share buttons obviously isn't working. I'm wondering what justifies further delay in fixing the problem?

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            ChristinSposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            I really have to agree that this issue should be a top priority and I certainly hope that is the case.

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               LongTimeMotherposted 9 years agoin reply to this

               Christin, do you remember if we were ever given an explanation for the decision to remove stats from our share icons? Everyone could see at a glance how many hundreds or thousands of people had shared any hub on facebook, by pinning etc - or if nobody had actually shared it yet.
               
               I wondered at the time if it was a strategy to deter thieves from copying popular hubs - although with the passing of time, it is obvious that content is still stolen and DMCAs still have to be lodged.
               
               Hopefully they'll reinstate those stats. I've noticed other websites still displaying them. It is one good way to monitor reader feedback. If lots of people are sharing a hub, it is obviously meeting their needs.
               
               Clearly hp are not currently concerned with discouraging theft. EC banners are a flag implying/indicating high quality and high traffic (whether that's true or not.) So I'm thinking now would be a good time to suggest they reinstate the share stats.
               
               I opted out of EC because my stats on those hubs dropped and even after a few months hadn't recovered. Are you happy with EC on yours?

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                  ChristinSposted 9 years agoin reply to this

                  I am happy with EC on mine so far so I've kept it for now. I've noticed most of my EC hubs are ones that are old.  None of my newer hubs in the last several months have "made the cut" - I know my writing didn't just suddenly start to suck lol, so I think they are just behind a bit or perhaps I have delusions of grandeur about my writing who knows?
                  
                  I agree with you on the stats counting on the share icons.  I enjoyed that feature and have it on my blogs. I was quite displeased when they did away with that.  The reason given was that it was slowing page load speeds, which they thought might negatively impact traffic, so I understood that reasoning.  This was of course before the multitudes of new ads that I would think would certainly slow page load speeds more, but I don't claim to be an expert in that aspect of things. 
                  
                  I too would like to see that feature returned, but I can live without it.  What I am not going to be content with is share buttons that are inconveniently located. At this point in their current location - why bother? No one can see them unless they hunt for them.  Christy says they are addressing it, so I hope that comes about soon .  That is a very important issue.  In my mind, it's much more important than ad layout testing when it is impacting traffic.  I didn't honestly pay attention to how long this has been going on and was blaming Google for traffic falls.  I'm watching more closely now with analytics.

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                  rebekahELLEposted 9 years agoin reply to this

                  If I recall, I think it slows down load time to collect data.  I remember that they were slow to load.

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                     LongTimeMotherposted 9 years agoin reply to this

                     Hi rebekah. I wonder how much extra time it takes to load Oprah sobbing in floating ads. It distracts me to see movement within ads. I hate them.
                     
                     Does having lots of photos slow down load time? If so, is it a mistake to encourage us to include them. Nobody would want to change their existing photos (me included), but perhaps we should be using smaller file sizes in future. I've started trying to remember to do that, just to see what difference it makes in my own hubs.
                     
                     I don't know how much difference it makes to load time collecting that data for share stats. It takes forever for everything to load on my computer, thanks to satellite internet. Did everyone else say, "Oh, great! These hubs load so much faster!" when the change was made?
                     
                     That's a serious question.

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         Venkatachari Mposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         Thank you Christy, for telling that you have plans to move the buttons upward in future. I suggest that these buttons can be placed on the left side at the bottom of completion of the hub before related articles and everything.

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   ChristinSposted 9 years ago

   Whew, thank goodness - Thanks Christy!

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      rebekahELLEposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      +   
      I can understand for a blog having them underneath the content, but not on a site like this where most viewers aren't going to scroll past the comments.

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   LongTimeMotherposted 9 years ago

   Don't hold your breath waiting for the share stats to be reinstated. I suspect hp will be far too embarrassed to do that for a l-o-n-g time.
   
   I just manually checked a hub that had over 2.5k shares when they were displayed. They are all gone now. Did that happen when I changed to EC ... and back again? Did that clear the counter?
   
   Maybe. But even if that's the case, the current position of the icons is obviously very wrong! It is quite a few months since I opted out of EC ... and even my most popular hubs are lucky to have a total of six shares, other than pins.  But I think pin stats reflect activity when pinners share within pinterest. I very much doubt readers would be finding the icon and only choosing to pin, not fb or g+ etc.
   
   One of the hubs I checked has 30 for twitter. That seems to be my highest stat (other than pins).
   
   Hard to imagine I'm the only one with such pathetic stats. Thank goodness I don't depend heavily on social media.
   
   Here's the link to manually check your own hubs. http://www.likeexplorer.com/
   I'm interested in hearing how it looks for others.  And I'm also interested in hearing how long exactly we are expected to wait before the ineffective positioning of the icons is rectified ...

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   rebekahELLEposted 9 years ago

   @Longtimemother, Paul E. expressed his priority a couple of weeks ago on a thread about editing.  He has numerous posts within the thread.  I think if you read it, you can understand why some of these other issues aren't at the top of the list.  Everything seems to be intertwined, but ad revenue keeps the site financially viable.  Content is still king, but it's much harder now with the competitiveness of ranking well with original, relevant, quality, user generated content that gives value to the reader.
   I hear you about some of the ads.  Nobody likes some of the crazy ads that show up on our hubs, but that's what pays the bills.
   Here's the post I referred to above.
   
   "My top priority is keeping HubPages financially viable while tackling these two things."
   http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/128471? … ost2704148

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      LongTimeMotherposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for the link. I followed it and noticed I participated on that thread (where I suggested a second site be established by hp for experienced writers which would be one way of addressing some of the current issues, while the general hp site problems are resolved).
      
      I don't have a problem with having ads ... just as I don't have a problem with ads on free-to-air tv. My problem is when ads distract the readers ... and detract from their experience/enjoyment of the site. There are some websites I won't visit, despite where they appear in search results, because I remember them as being really annoying sites for one reason or another.

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         ChristinSposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         +1 absolutely.  I understand the need to make money with ads, but some of the ads are obnoxious and it will keep people from returning or clicking on HP in search results.  I never click about.com links for example because their site is, or at least it used to be, so spammy and intrusive.

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   jansharesposted 9 years ago

   Those social media sharing buttons have been in that bottom position for several weeks, ChristinS. It makes you wonder how much impact it has had on the very low traffic most of us have been experiencing.

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   jansharesposted 9 years ago

   FYI, the social sharing buttons are halfway down the page on my Kindke Fire. Maybe there's a difference in placement between mobile and desktop/laptop?

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      rebekahELLEposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      I don't see the icons on my android mobile device.

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