The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter
Mitra and Gilbert are investigating how and why certain crowd funding projects succeed or fail.
One of the first interesting points I found were what metrics of a project were targeted for analysis. Mitra and Gilbert look specifically at accurately predicting project success (funded or not funded). I feel that while this is a very important metric to be predicting, there are others that could be useful in making a social change. If a project is generating more attention outside of Kickstarter, the sheer number of project views may give a less-than-stellar project more funding than an incredible project that is seen by few people. Mitra and Gilbert do find counterexamples to this (Ninja Baseball), but I believe that it is intuitive that projects with more visibility are seen by more potential funders, and thus receive more funding. Maybe a metric such as ‘average funding per project viewer‘ would give a better insight into the general qualities of a successful Kickstarter project. This metric would show a stark contrast between one project that makes 1% of viewers into backers and another project where 30% of viewers become backers. Outside media influence and advertising may significantly alter the outcomes of these projects, so page views are one way of researching another factor of crowd funding success. However, measurements like this might not be collectible if Kickstarter refuses to release project viewership and specific funding statistics.
There is a large incentive for malicious users to create fake projects that become funded, since it can be used as a source of revenue. While Kickstarter’s quality control will work against these projects, they may still be impacting the data collected in this research. It can be quite difficult to determine realism from digital content, which is the majority of the communication and information that is shown on a Kickstarter page. Verifying dubious claims in crowd funding projects can be difficult for those without high levels of technical knowledge, leading to the growth of content that ‘debunks’ these claims (e.g. ‘Captain Disillusion’ and ‘ElectroBOOM’ Youtube channels). It would be extremely difficult for a machine to differentiate real Kickstarter projects with novel concepts from malevolent projects that are created to fool wary human viewers. It is not clear if Mitra and Gilbert foresaw this possible issue and took steps to avoid it. Although there are some natural social protections from these fake projects since the more lucrative projects have a larger audience, and thus more scrutiny from the public. Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing project funding outlook is another natural defense, but not all crowd funding platforms share this. I expect that similar research on other platforms could show some radically different results.
Another route of expanding this research could be through investigating how culture affects crowd funding. Capitalism plays a close role to how crowd funding is currently structured in the USA, so cultures and societies that support alternative outlooks may show desire towards very different looking projects. Nearly all of the factors Mitra and Gilbert discussed (reciprocity, scarcity, authority, etc…) are connected to specific human values or motivations. So exploring how crowd funding success can be predicted among audiences with varying levels of materialism, empathy, and collectivism could show how to raise funding for projects that benefit other cultures as well.
