The Effects of Multimodal Elements on Success in Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaigns

This article investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowdfunding campaigns on the platform Kickstarter to develop an understanding of characteristics of successful campaigns. The authors scraped 327,586 campaign pages, analyzing the multimodal elements of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. They found that successful campaigns featured more images, links, and gifs and more frequently included a project video than did unsuccessful campaigns. Images, links, and the presence of a project video had a positive impact on success while gifs and project galleries did not. These findings give business communicators practical guidance, develop theoretical aspects of Kickstarter research, and validate previous findings with a larger data set.