Researchers devise way to predict if Kickstarter project will succeed in four hours

Kickstarter projects are all the rage currently. If you have an idea, you can pitch an crowd-funding project on a website like Kickstarter or Indiegogo and convince people to invest money into it. In return, they get to be a small part of your project or get something in return. There have been some massively successful Kickstarter stories including Pebble smartwatch, The Newest Hottest Spike Lee Joint and even Ouya. But, by the site’s own admission, 56 percent of Kickstarter campaigns do not see the light of day.

Since the general period of Kickstarter projects is one month, to see if a project is successful or not, you need to wait long. However, The Daily Dot has reported that researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has devised a way to figure out if a campaign will be successful or not, within four hours of it going live.

It takes just four hours to know if you will succeed

The researchers have come up with an algorithm that can predict the ultimate success or failure of a Kickstarter project with up to a brilliant 76 percent accuracy, within four hours of it launching. To come up with this formula, the researchers, Vincent Etter, Matthias Grossglauser and Patrick Thiran studied about 16,000 Kickstarter projects over a period of nine-months.

During their study, the researchers also came up with a database of backers who made donations and also tracked social networking activities of Facebook and Twitter. They noted that in part, Kickstarter campaigns that worked out had 3.2 times as many social media mentions on Twitter as ones that failed. The study was carried out between September 2012 and May 2013 and it was found that there was a higher overall success rate than the 44 percent Kickstarter had claimed earlier. About 48 percent of new campaigns had managed to reach their goal on a positive note.

There have reportedly been other attempts to predict Kickstarter success but since these models were based on static attributes at the start of a campaign, they’ve seen a far smaller rate of 68 percent success. So, if you’re planning to come up with a Kickstarter project you might as well keep a track on this study, to see if yours will be successful or not.