More generally, with the help of these tools and recommendations, platforms are achieving ever-higher rates of success. KissKissBankBank went from a 34% success rate in 58 projects launched in 2010, to a 70% success rate out of a total of 4,470 projects in 2017. Ulule has an overall success rate of 65%, while Kickstarter has a lower rate of 35.8%. Although success rates vary widely across different cultural sectors—depending on the mobilization of the available donors and the average amounts pledged—they testify above all to the success of simplified recommendations, and to the fact that platforms have an interest in emphasizing these recommendations yet further so as to optimize the number of successful campaigns and the fees earned from them.
- The ‘Community’
Lastly, on a third and more indirect ‘external’ level, we find the work of ‘community management’, which is largely outsourced to project creators. For a crowdfunding campaign to succeed, ‘leverage’ on digital social networks obviously has to be optimized. This remains one of the priorities of the various people who work for the platform. It is to be achieved by ensuring the ergonomics and fluidity of the site and its interconnection with external networks and players. Project creators have a clear role to play here, since it is up to them to launch the project, to maintain and increase the flow of donors and to ensure the everyday management of these ‘communities’. They must make every efort to publicize their project; they are ‘invited’ to send regular updates through e-mail and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) to family, friends and acquaintances, following a centripetal logic known as ‘the three circles’ (family and friends, acquaintances and the wider public). To attain the required ‘levels’, they must continually activate their network. But as in the model of the ‘two step flow of communication’ developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld (2017[1955]), it must be enriched by similar, redundant activities on the part of members of the ‘community’ who support the project. This labour is fundamental, since projects are hierarchized as a function of community activity, becoming more or less prominent on the site depending on quantitative variables defined by the management (support, fans, subscribers, likes, comments, etc.). Some players even define this regular, time-consuming involvement as a kind of ‘art’, which suggests that they must draw some benefit from elevating routine administrative processes into art forms, and raises significant questions about the real level of permeability between these two domains.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization