Summary
This paper details the research into different aspects of crowdfunding, especially kickstarter. They specifically looked at the dynamics of crowdfunding, analyzing text for social information, and theories of persuasion. When analyzing and looking at data, the research team had to pay close attention to key words within certain categories that could skew the analysis of which phrases cause more crowd support. For example, words like “menu” and “game credits” were much more common in the “Food” and “Games” respectively. The researchers displayed different words and phrases found in descriptions for kickstarter pages and how they correlate with those pages meeting their financial goals. They found that the phrases “we have chosen”, “got you”, and “and encouragement” were found to help a kickstarter page and the phrases “provide us”, “need one”, and “not be able” tend to hurt the chances that a kickstarter won’t be successful.
Reflection
I never thought this would be as interesting of a topic as it turned out to be. This study makes me wonder if similar studies can be done on other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Especially with YouTube descriptions, to see if the views on the channel increase or decrease from the normal amount based on the video description and tags. Something similar could be done with twitter hashtags and tumblr tags. Some other future research I would add onto this would be studying which types of kickstarters (in which categories) are the most successful, and what keywords help those to be even more successful. I don’t think this specifically will add to the current research done on this topic, but I found the following video very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oStLD-yYAy0 (it discusses kickstarter projects and their likelihood to be successful as well as general background information on how kickstarter works.)
Questions
- What additional work can be done in this area?
- How can similar studies be applied to other social media sites?
- How can the information from this video be used in future research?
- How do websites like indigogo and gofundme compare with kickstarter?
- Could similar studies be done on these other sites? Would they wield the same results?
