A picture is worth a thousand words (question of the month)
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But sometimes additional explanations are needed to understand the content of the picture. We at Zwischengas spend a lot of time editing (hopefully) meaningful and understandable captions. That's why we asked last month's "Question of the Month" on our own behalf, to find out whether these explanatory texts are important to Zwischengas readers (whether in print or online).
One month later, we can breathe a sigh of relief. Our work so far has not been in vain! More than three quarters of all readers (78.2 %) do not want to do without the small texts accompanying the photos. And we don't want that either. This is because it is often possible to hide a punchline or a little bit of additional information that didn't fit into the actual article.
Even more so than on printed paper, we often face a conflict of objectives online. On the one hand, of course, we don't want to literally regurgitate what is visible in pictures. On the other hand, we want our photos to be easy to find in our image archive even after ten years. And we are quite happy when the word "blinker" actually appears in the text accompanying a photo of a blinker.
A good fifth (21.1 %) could occasionally do without a caption if the image is self-explanatory. We see it the same way. Why do we rarely do it anyway? See previous paragraph.
What we are particularly pleased about: Not even one in a hundred readers (0.8 %) thinks captions are generally unnecessary. As a compromise, we can offer to dispense with the accompanying text for every hundredth picture.
The polling stations for our new "Question of the Month" are of course already open. In it, we want to know whether a bit of secrecy in the car ad is more likely to attract or deter prospective buyers.
And, of course, you can still read the evaluations of all previous questions of the week and month in the corresponding topic channel. And we are always happy to receive suggestions as to what else might interest our readers!
