Mining Kickstarter Data Reveals How To Match Crowdfunding Projects To Investors

KentuckyFC writes Since 2001, crowdfunding sites have raised almost $3 billion and in 2012 alone, successfully funded more than 1 million projects. But while many projects succeed, far more fail. The reasons for failure are varied and many but one of the most commonly cited is the inability to match a project with suitable investors. Now a group of researchers from Yahoo Labs and the University of Cambridge have mined data from Kickstarter to discover how investors choose projects to back. They studied over 1000 projects in the US funded by over 80,000 investors. They conclude that there are two types of backers: occasional investors who tend to back arts-related projects, probably because of some kind of social connection to the proposers; and frequent investors who have a much more stringent set of criteria. Frequent investors tend to fund projects that are well-managed, have high pledging goals, are global, grow quickly, and match their interests. The team is now working on a website that will create a list of the Twitter handles of potential investors given the URL of a Kickstarter project.

Comments

goodbye Kickstarter

[Tom]

The moment I get spam about Kickstarter projects, I'll delete my account there. Who else?

Kickstarter is a cool concept, but one of the things that made it cool is that at its core, it has this idea of presenting your idea and letting people come to you. The more you reverse it, by "reaching out" (marketing speak) aka spamming (real human speak) people with your project, the more it is simply and advertisement platform. And nobody gives a flying fuck about advertisement platforms, as we can see from the absence of the Internet equivalent of the shopping channel.

Re:goodbye Kickstarter

[Anubis IV]

These are independent researchers, not Kickstarter itself, and as the summary says, they'd be spamming you via Twitter. The simple fix is to remove your Twitter handle from your Kickstarter profile, that way they don't have a way to engage in an activity with you that they'd verbalize by using marketing speak buzzwords.

This may backfire

[roman_mir]

Kickstarter is already providing the tools to connect innovators with investors, datamining investor information in order to target them personally like that may backfire and rather than entice them to invest more it may turn them against the very concept. Everybody needs a some degree of control over their actions and choices, stop pushing people, they are not your puppets.

Re:Not investors

[sacdelta]

While a number of projects certainly are treated this way, it is this attitude from users that has ruined my enjoyment of backing projects.

Backers are certainly not investing in the traditional sense since they do not get any share of profits, etc, but once upon a time, they were investing in having an idea become available. I backed many projects just to see the idea come to be. Ideas that could not get funding through traditional means. Between a mix of people who were trying to get a fast buck and backers loudly complaining that their "pre-order" was taking too long, it just became too much trouble.

People could no longer take chances on interesting things because they had to provide constant assurances to backers that they would get their loot.

A project pretty much has to be good to go now which has made it difficult for new people to get into the game with fresh ideas. There is too much risk those projects might fail and backers will come screaming for their money back.