Apparently there’s now a man that can predict whether your Kickstarter project will fail or succeed in a matter of hours.
Vincent Etter and a team of Swiss researchers use Twitter activity, number of backers, and total cash pledged to predict the success, which may take some of the fun out for a lot of hopefuls, but it seems like it could be useful.
Within four hours of launching a Kickstarter project, three researchers from the Swiss university EPFL can tell whether it will succeed – with 76% accuracy.
According to their paper, presented at the Conference on Online Social Networks, Vincent Etter, Matthias Grossglauser and Patrick Thirar beats the current best estimates by eight percentage points. An earlier paper by an American team can predict success with 68% accuracy.
The team combine information from interest shown on Twitter, the previous projects backed by supporters, the number of first-time backers and how quickly the money is coming in to gain an ‘accurate’ insight just a few hours in.
They have also built a tool called Sidekick, which applies their theories to live Kickstarter projects.
"The model reaches 85% accuracy after only 10% of the campaign [duration]," says Etter. "The accuracy is of course close to 100% near the end of the campaign, but this is pretty useless, as there is not much you can do at that point."
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I’m sure the tool will cause a lot of heartache for would-be campaign successes. Better off finding out earlier than later though, eh?
"It is not impossible to recover from a slow start," Etter adds. "There are projects that took a while to take off, but that eventually made it. Nevertheless, I would say that if your project has still not taken off by the middle of the campaign, your chances are quite low."
Brutal.
The difference between this team’s approach and the earlier American paper is that this one uses live information, whereas the previous only looked at info available before the Kickstarter kicked off.
Etter offers some advice with his psychic ability though: "As shown by Greenberg’s work, it is really important to put a lot of effort into the campaign itself: description, introduction video, rewards, etc. But once it has launched, you should try to maintain some activity on social networks.
"This sounds trivial, but generating tweets about your project, by sharing updates, engaging backers, etc., is the best way to create attention and ultimately get people to back your project.
"Moreover, one thing that comes out from the many descriptive studies on Kickstarter campaigns is that campaigns that fail usually ask for more money, over a longer time period (with the exception of video games, for which successful campaigns have a higher goal on average). So you should be realistic about what you ask."
