Another example is given in the following exchange between two entrepreneurs, reported by Jouan from one of her observations at an internal seminar for the organization Crowdfunding France:
Denis: I really get the feeling that we focus too much on the purely financial side of things, and we forget this whole other aspect of the campaign, and beyond that the project creator of course, and then a community who will contribute a lot of other services apart from funding. It’s not just the financial and budgetary aspect. I know we’re at Bercy [Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry], but other arguments need to be heard, just so that we don’t see this as a matter of finance and nothing else […]
Lilian: Once again, I would say yes, you’re quite right […]. But at the end of the day, you can say what you want, but crowdfunding is still funding […]. The link between all of this, after all, is that at a some point you get some money. So it’s a diferent way of getting money, but it’s still getting money. No one does all of this for nothing! In the end, how do we measure the success of crowdfunding on a site? Either the funds are released or not, depending on what you’ve put in, and that’s the plain fact of the matter. That’s why people do it. (Jouan 2017: 148)
The expression ‘you can say what you want’ refers back to Denis’s comment that the values of mutual aid and the construction of ‘communities’ should be foregrounded, whereas Lilian emphasizes that non-financial support (live capital) and financial support (dead capital) are both ways of obtaining capital. The exchange confirms that the managers of platforms are players, one of whose principal skills consists in being able to ‘say what you want’ (i.e. their propensity for ‘story-telling’). But what is no doubt more interesting is the second part of the quote: ‘Either the funds are released or not, depending on what you’ve put in.’ We might relate this comment to the investment of the platform managers who may or may not make a profit when the funds are released, depending on their work in educating project creators. But we may also, of course, relate it to the project creators themselves, who may or may not obtain the funds they asked for (through direct financial or indirect contributions), depending on what they have ‘put in’, such as labour time in marketing and communication— in short, ideological production as well.
Finally, during an interview with the founder of a crowdfunding site for concerts, we asked to what extent he had to encourage artists to keep their social media pages updated. He responded:
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization