Crowdsourcing Money: Images vs Video?

Following up on Giordano's crowdsourcing numbers post, which in turn follows up on my previous crowdsourcing corpora post is a recent Optimizely post on crowdsourcing money. The post includes a comparison of button label text and the effect of using images versus videos for a splash page for the political fundraising efforts of Obama.



(image via: wikipedia: Obama Steelers.jpg)

Details and politics aside, it is remarkable to consider the crowdsourcing of money as an experimental undertaking. Not only that but an undertaking based on a full-factorial multivariate design. As for images versus videos? The authors found:

Before we ran the experiment, the campaign staff heavily favored "Sam's Video" (the last one in the slideshow shown above). Had we not run this experiment, we would have very likely used that video on the splash page. That would have been a huge mistake since it turns out that all of the videos did worse than all of the images.

Which I think also points to the scalability of keeping things simple.