Kickstarter has become the Internet’s prime vector for Cinderella stories, catapulting pet projects to fame and burying would-be entrepreneurs in more logistics and minutiae than they were ready to handle. There are many different degrees of success on Kickstarter, but when broken down to a binary yes/no score, a group of scientists have found that they can predict with reasonable confidence whether a project will succeed or fail within the first four hours of its launch. Their method is based in part on its social media reception, according to a paper presented early in October.
Three researchers at the Éccole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne created statistical models fed with both funding data and discussions on Twitter. The data set was pulled from over 16,000 Kickstarter campaigns that had raised a collective total of $158 million; approximately half of them failed.
via Ars Technica
