Online Media: Scopes and Challenges in New Paradigm Shifts of Production Methodologies

With the new paradigm shifts in the film industry and online video content, cheap digital technology and the democratisation of the filmmaking process, filmmakers now can connect to an ‘expert’ global, niche audience with more immediacy through the internet;engaging virtual communities, utilising crowd funding support and fan-building initiatives through a variety of social media landscapes. Key themes: Purpose and prospective readers: academics and practicing scholars of new media and digital interfaces. Significance of contribution: Case study measures and outcomes of emerging production practices. Practicality and usefulness of my work: paradigm shifts in new media and production methodologies are shifting cultural mindsets and artistic practices while engaging with participatory audiences online. Implications of study and future areas of work: the implications of the work are necessary to determine methodology practices, and emerging fields of digital humanities works. Future areas are as follows: Narrative Fiction and Documentary Film; Performance; Social Media; Emerging online arts practices and how the artist works in an online, participatory environment; Online/Distance learning particularly as experienced through communications and performative practices; Digital technology and new media methodologies and communications practices.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Signalling entrepreneurs’ credibility and project quality for crowdfunding success:cases from the Kickstarter and Indiegogo environments

In recent years, entrepreneurs have increasingly turned to crowdfunding, a new form of entrepreneurial finance, to fund projects. Whilst research has shown that signals originating from the entrepreneur and project can affect the outcome of crowdfunding, how different signals work together under different signalling environments remains underexplored. Drawing on signalling theory, we examine how signals of entrepreneurs’ credibility (success, failure, backer and industry experience) and project quality (preparedness and third-party endorsements) produce crowdfunding success in different signalling environments. We collected a unique dataset with matched projects listed on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but with different funding models, to represent two distinct signalling environments. Results based on qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) identify two distinct signalling patterns that show entrepreneur’s credibility and project quality signals can complement each other to produce crowdfunding success. In an environment with less uncertainty, entrepreneur’s credibility in terms of crowdfunding experience can also compensate absent project quality to produce crowdfunding success. In an environment with higher uncertainty, entrepreneur’s credibility and project quality need to be both present to establish the necessary legitimacy for crowdfunding to be successful. Furthermore, by integrating positive (i.e. success) and negative (i.e. failure) signals, we demonstrate how signal incongruence can enhance crowdfunding success. Plain English Summary: Failure experience is an important signal in achieving crowdfunding success, but its effectiveness depends on other signals as well as the signalling environment. Our study shows how crowdfunding success can be achieved in multiple ways and that the path to success depends on the funding model of the platform used. For entrepreneurs to demonstrate credibility, backer experience and project preparedness are important. Both are under the control of the entrepreneur and well worth considering investing effort into. Importantly, the study also shows that demonstrating failure experience is important in achieving crowdfunding success. Failure experience can either replace the lack of prior success experience by demonstrating a track record of learning or it can enhance prior success experience by producing a more realistic picture of the entrepreneurs. Thus, the study offers practical implications for entrepreneurs on how to use different signals to increase the likelihood of success in reward-based crowdfunding

An Exploratory Study of Creating Persuasive and Effective Blurbs in Reward-Based Crowdfunding (RBCF)

Crowdfunding is an alternative financing for funding innovative businesses. Research shows that reward-based crowdfunding (RBCF) is increasingly pivotal for raising project capital, given the current Covid-19 climate where conventional funding is scarce. The project blurbs are essential to attract funds. However, little has been done in studying the project blurb and how it impacts the campaign’s outcomes. Therefore, this paper aims to explore unique words for creating persuasive and effective blurbs that increase RBCF project success by studying their sentiments. This research collects Kickstarter data from June 2019 to June 2020. Descriptive, sentiment and word analyses are incorporated. This triangulation contributes to a practical guideline in creating effective project blurbs. The descriptive analysis offers contexts such as length and time. Sentiment analysis informs positive sentiments spread across successful and failed projects, requiring word analysis to determine the unique words used in writing persuasive and effective blurb to increase project success

Will Your Project Get the Green Light? Predicting the Success of Crowdfunding Campaigns

Capital is always essential for a business project over times. After emerging in 2000, crowdfunding gradually becomes one of the most popular fundraising resources. However, the mechanism of crowdfunding significantly differs from traditional capital-collecting approaches. As long as the amount of pledged money reaches the goal in time, the project succeeds, its initiator receives the funds, the platform gains the revenue, and its backers acquire rewards. Reaching the goal by deadline becomes an important issue. The goal of our study is to develop an effective technique for predicting whether a crowdfunding campaign will succeed or fail. On the basis of a dataset collected from Kickstarter, our empirical evaluation results suggest that our proposed technique significantly outperforms the benchmark method. In addition, with the use of time-dependent factors, the prediction accuracy improves from 72.89% at day 0 to 87.13% at the first day and eventually to 89.62% at day 7

Big Ideas for Small Business Report

Big Ideas for Small Business is a national peer network led by the National League of Cities (NLC) that aims to accelerate efforts by local governments to support small businesses and encourage entrepreneurship.  This direct peer-to-peer engagement expands the capacity of city staff to explore common challenges, share proven strategies, and collaborate on new approaches for creating a more business-friendly city.  The Big Ideas for Small Business toolkit discusses important strategies for how local leaders can be better advocates for small businesses. Our report provides guidance on creating ecosystems that support small business growth; reorganizing city resources to better meet the needs of small businesses; and providing business owners with access to new sources of capital. Specific strategies highlighted in this report explain how to:Connect Small Businesses to Information and ResourcesEstablish a Small Business Resource Center Advocate for Small Businesses via Community-Led Councils or CommitteesProactively Engage the Local Business CommunityProvide Platforms for NetworkingCreate Incubator SpacesCelebrate Successful BusinessesDevelop One-Stop-Shops and Express Lanes at City Hall Streamline City Regulations and the Inspection ProcessHelp Small Businesses Build a Web PresenceSupport Microlending and CrowdfundingEncourage Local Small Businesses to Bid for City Contracts

Consumer protection on Kickstarter

This article investigates consumer protection on Kickstarter—a popular and sizeable, yet largely unregulated reward-based crowdfunding platform. Specifically, the article focuses on Kickstarter campaigns’ use of price advertising claims (PACs) and their failure to honor the promised discounts. Analyses show that between 2009 and 2016, more than 500,000 consumers who backed a wide variety of game or technology campaigns lost on average $45.72 because of broken PAC promises. Whereas 75% of PAC campaigns did not provide the promised discounts, in almost 50% of all cases backers who were promised a discount paid more, not less, than the retail price. In contrast, backers of campaigns that did not promise a discount received larger effective discounts. Analyzing an extensive data set comprising 34,745 Kickstarter campaigns, complete backing histories of more than 400,000 backers, and more than 4 million consumer comments, complaints, and reviews, we show that broken PAC promises pose a substantial problem to consumers, that the problem is persistent across more than 6 years, and that it has not been resolved through self-regulation by market participants thus far

Extraction of Visual Information to Predict Crowdfunding Success

Researchers have increasingly turned to crowdfunding platforms to gain insights into entrepreneurial activity and dynamics. While previous studies have explored various factors influencing crowdfunding success, such as technology, communication, and marketing strategies, the role of visual elements that can be automatically extracted from images has received less attention. This is surprising, considering that crowdfunding platforms emphasize the importance of attention-grabbing and high-resolution images, and previous research has shown that image characteristics can significantly impact product evaluations. Indeed, a comprehensive review of empirical articles (n = 202) that utilized Kickstarter data, focusing on the incorporation of visual information in their analyses. Our findings reveal that only 29.70% controlled for the number of images, and less than 12% considered any image details. In this manuscript, we review the literature on image processing and its relevance to the business domain, highlighting two types of visual variables: visual counts (number of pictures and number of videos) and image details. Building upon previous work that discussed the role of color, composition and figure-ground relationships, we introduce visual scene elements that have not yet been explored in crowdfunding, including the number of faces, the number of concepts depicted, and the ease of identifying those concepts. To demonstrate the predictive value of visual counts and image details, we analyze Kickstarter data. Our results highlight that visual count features are two of the top three predictors of success. Our results also show that simple image detail features such as color matter a lot, and our proposed measures of visual scene elements can also be useful. We supplement our article with R and Python codes that help authors extract image details (https://osf.io/ujnzp/).Comment: 32 pages, 5 figure