PRESENTACIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE LOS RESULTADOS

Kickstarter is one of the most successful crowdfunding platforms. It was created by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler and it was launched in the United States on

28 April, 2009. Over time, Kickstarter has become accessible from other locations, such as Canada (9 September, 2012), the United Kingdom (31 October, 2012), Australia and New Zealand (13 November, 2013), Demark, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden (15 September, 2014), and Spain (19 May, 2015). Kickstarter is, primarily, intended for creators who come to the crowdfunding platform to promote their projects by connecting their various social media platforms to their campaign. More than other crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter has become quite influential in the art market.

Chen and Jones (2013) described Kickstarter as ‘… a website providing a centralized hub to help people crowd-source funding for their projects, especially creative projects’. Based on statistics from Kickstarter’s website, as of 2016, 36% of the campaigns on the platform were successfully funded17_{. According to the global media company, Forbes}

‘Kickstarter has become synonymous with crowdfunding, as the most popular site for seeking funding for creative projects’18_.

Kickstarter, in its most basic form, is a platform creators can use to introduce their project(s) and request funding to complete them. To entice potential backers to support them, it is important for creators to use persuasive images, videos, and written content to encourage engagement and an understanding of the project’s value. This process includes a description of various tiers of funding support as well as rewards for pledges. In an effort to augment this process, most creators will also use other social media platforms to cross- promote their campaign. Once the campaign ends, if it is successfully funded, Kickstarter will retain 5% of the funds raised as its commission for using the platform and the artists recoup the remaining 95%. This favourable commission rate is the main reason why a large

number of creators prefer to obtain funding through a crowdfunding platform like

Kickstarter. If artists depend on galleries or other organizations, it is likely they will only get half of their work’s purchase price (for more on this, see Figure 5 below).

Figure 5: Kickstarter Revenue Model (source: boardofinnovation.com)

In 2012, over 2 million people had pledged a total of 319,786,629 USD on Kickstarter, resulting in 18,109 successful projects. Remarkably, 99% of countries worldwide took part in funding Kickstarter campaigns. In 2013, 3 million people pledged 480 million USD to Kickstarter projects. According to the math, an average of 1,315,520 USD was pledged daily. The 3 million people who backed projects came from 214 countries and territories, and from all seven continents (even Antarctica). In 2014, over 3.3 million people had pledged over half a billion dollars on Kickstarter, which is equivalent to 1,000 USD per minute.

According to statistics from the UK Fundraising website, those who organise their campaigns in conjunction with other social media platforms, such as Facebook (43%), Reddit (30%), Twitter (16%), YouTube (7%), and others (4%), are more likely to achieve their funding goals. In 2015, 36% of projects were successfully funded.

Compared to traditional funding models, the major difference in crowdfunding is the relationship with intermediaries. According to the statistics on the website

crowdfunding.org, the scale of the crowdfunding market was estimated at 1.5 billion USD worldwide as of 2011. More recently, Daniel Broderick (2014) pointed out that the

economic scale had risen to over 5.1 billion USD worldwide as of 2013. In 2015, there were 258,532 p r o j e c t s t h a t h a d b e e n launched on Kickstarter, of which 93,077 were successful. That same year, Kickstarter attracted 9,519,204 backers who pledged just under 2 billion dollars (1,972,370,450 USD) to Kickstarter projects.

Over time it has become clear that crowdfunding has the power to overturn the traditional power distribution in the art market by enabling artists and creators to become self-sufficient. That being said, according to a recent Kickstarter website poll, 63.51% of projects are unsuccessful (i.e. do not achieve their stated goal). This is due to Kickstarter’s ‘all or nothing’ model19_.

Based upon Kickstarter’s stats, it is evident that even though this crowdfunding platform creates an opportunity for artists to solicit funding for their projects so that they can become self-sufficient, there is no guarantee that this will happen. Given the fact that over 50% of campaign creators could not make their campaigns successful on Kickstarter, there is more research required to identify how artists can maintain successful campaigns on crowdfunding platforms. This research project does just that.

Beginning with a preliminary sketch by Mollick et al. (2013), it would seem that the size of the social network and the number of Facebook ‘likes’ on a page influences a

Kickstarter campaign’s success (Moisseyev, 2013; Giudici et al., 2013; Mollick, 2014). These researchers further suggested that it is vital to spread information to key individuals and groups (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014; Aral and Van Alstyne, 2011).

Although research on crowdfunding remains limited, there is a body of work on how creators can successfully build networks on social media to support their career aspirations (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Perlstein, 2013; Wheat et al., 2013). This includes information about the difficulties of creating online communities, such as starting up the community, attracting members, motivating commitment, motivating contributions, and regulating community health and wellness (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014).

Several researchers have incorporated questions into their case study interviews to probe these issues more deeply. For example, Hui et al. (2014) carried out interviews with 105 crowdfunding project creators to explore the process of launching campaigns and the challenges of developing a network. From these interviews, the researchers concluded that crowdfunding involves more than simply raising money, it requires preparing materials, merchandising, testing designs, publicising the project, and working towards the project’s goal.

These activities are not only time-consuming, they also require a broad variety of skills – many of which are not possessed by the typical entrepreneur, let alone artists and creators. One creator, for instance, had this to say when asked about developing a video to promote their work:

It was enveloping in terms of taking up time and emotion and overall effort. Creating a video, obviously, is difficult. I felt like it was a good opportunity and a good experience, but it takes a lot of time developing a script, collecting all the videos, editing, etc. (Hui,Greenberg, et al., 2014, p65).

For some Kickstarter campaign creators, it was valuable to test promotional materials prior to their campaign’s launch with a pilot audience. Reflecting on this experience, one campaign creator said

I was nervous because it’s one thing to be sitting in front of a computer, and it’s quite another thing to show a video to an audience where you can actually hear their reactions... Are they going to find this funny? When you haven’t done something like that before, it’s a little intimidating (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p66).

When it comes to the stage of publicising a crowdfunding project, one of Hui’s interviewees suggested that the most difficult part is spreading news about the project and managing relationships with potential backers.

It’s honestly, like, it’s a full-time job. If you’re going to launch a Kickstarter, you have to be prepared to devote 4-5 hours a day just to making sure that you are promoting it or following up on it, you know, or anything like that (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p67).

One successful crowdfunding campaigner had this to say about the experience of making connections and building relationships:

I was emailing people individually asking for support... I would say, “hey person’s name, I am doing this project. It’s really cool,” and give them like a description of it, and at the end of it, I would say, “I know that this project will be very successful on Kickstarter because of supporters like you” (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p68).

Those campaign creators who were unsuccessful shared what they had learned from this process as well.

I’ve reached out to dozens and dozens of blogs and newspapers and entertainment sites... And I’ve just gotten a couple of mentions, which really surprises me. It’s been very difficult getting the word out there... I have good friends that I haven’t been able to get to the site. It’s very shocking. It kind of shows you who your real friends are (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p68).

The importance of cooperation was also noted in Hui’s research, especially with respect to the exchange of labor.

Say you do layout or you do editing, there’s sort of this relationship now that you get with project creators where you can sort of agree on a handshake deal to work on their project on the condition that it be funded first... So, though no money has exchanged hands, and no one’s really contractually obliged to... you can still come to agreements that are mutually beneficial (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p68).

Given these considerations, even though crowdfunding makes it possible for creators to have their projects funded outside of traditional funding streams and models, there are

In keeping with this theme, Hui et al. (2014) observed three major infrastructural challenges that emerged from their interviews, namely understanding network capability, activating network connections, and expanding network reach. The most significant challenge these researchers highlighted is building the campaign’s audience.

Although it can be difficult to get even close ties to visit campaigns, the support of weaker ties can come as a pleasant surprise to Kickstarter creators. One creator Hui et al. (2014) interviewed shared ‘… there are people I went to high school with, people I haven’t seen in 20 years... and I’ve gotten them onto the site, and they’ve become backers’

(Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p680).

Some creators believed that positivity is the key to the kind of successful

communications that covert potential audience members into backers. Specifically, one of Hui et al.’s (2014) interviewees shared that her initial approach – focusing on her need for support – faltered. She had much more success changing her message to something more positive. ‘[I said] I know that this project will be very successful on Kickstarter because of supporters like you, and then I listed a lot of people that that person knew that had already supported’ (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p678).

In addition to maintaining positivity in messaging, the scale of a campaign creator’s audience base is critical to crowdfunding success (Mollick, 2014). Oftentimes, developing a network is relatively neglected in the process of building a campaign, meaning many

creators are left to build their reputation and become popular in a short period of time. Other successful creators dedicated up to one year to expanding their network prior to launching their campaign. On this point, one successful starter shared,

when I was getting started, I didn’t have the name recognition. All I had were contacts in the community, and so I had to spend a lot of time putting myself out there, blogging, sharing thoughts, getting into discussions, going back and forth with people, responding to comments very quickly…. (Hui,Gerber, et al., 2014, p679).

The impact of his efforts at building followers – through Twitter, Facebook, and a personal blog – are significant. His first campaign successfully raised 3,030 USD and his second one raised 24,000 USD.

Taking a synthesis of these findings, it is evident that artists who create Kickstarter campaigns will confront challenges expanding their networks because it places demands on their time, requires a particular communication style, and it requires successfully making connections with the right groups (i.e. individuals and groups who share the artists’ interests and value what they do). This can be a frustrating reality for creative types, as they must pay for the freedom they expect. Their work does not just speak for itself and command financial backing on its own merit.