Summary:
“The Language that Gets People to Give” is a paper written on what kinds of language and its use make for successful crowdfunded ideas. It begins with examples of both successful and unsuccessful ideas on Kickstarter, namely “Pebble” and “Ninja Baseball” and then attempts to figure out why one was successful, and the other not. Then it goes into depth on previous research in the field, and most importantly, why it is different or how it improves on the previous work. Then it goes over the different variables used and how the analysis was done. It then goes over the things that were found as the most important, pretty much all phrases, and shows a list of the phrases it found to be important. Finally it goes over other ideas that may help drive crowdfunding, such as giving out extra products as a reward for donating a certain amount, or giving out personal thanks.
Response:
This paper very quickly goes into detail about its analysis, and it’s actually quite understandable, especially compared to some of the stuff we’ve read before. This is good because language analysis can be difficult, and I know it’s something my group wants to do some work with. The fact that about half of projects get funded, where half obviously do not, is interesting. It’s just odd that it ends up being an almost perfect 50/50 split. The controlling for genre or category specific ideas and phrases is incredibly important to me. As a group working on figuring out false news articles it is integral that we be able to pull out things that aren’t necessarily part of the article, or phrases that are just used in the subject. Because of this, it’s something we’ll need to think about quite a bit. The statistics on adding the controls and phrases to the model is also incredible, 2.4% error is insanely low for almost any model. The table of phrases as well as the public data set may end up being very useful to our project as well. Even if they won’t be the same, because they won’t ours is dealing with news and informative articles not crowdfunding, the ideas are very similar. So the detail on the analysis should prove extremely useful. It’s also good to know that our teacher understands language analysis, I’ll be asking you more questions soon. Finally some of the alternative reasons for success could be useful to think about on the news standpoint. Each of them translates at least slightly, and if nothing else are things we should bear in mind and start thinking of things which pertain specifically to our subject (such as what sources an article cites, or what type of articles it cites).
Questions:
What other than language might determine how successful a crowdfunded idea is?
Have you ever participated in a crowdfunding? What was it for? Do you think it was a good idea to support it?
