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Should Facebook Acquire Kickstarter?

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This article is more than 10 years old.

Noah Chestnut, Director of Digital at Hamilton Place Strategies

Yes. Easy to say, difficult to explain. Bear with me. Fast Company's Ian Bogost writes (emphasis added);

Kickstarters are dreams, and that's their strength rather than their weakness. People back projects on Kickstarter to fund the development of a new creative work or a consumer product that might never see the light of day via traditional financing. But what if Kickstarter is more about the experience of kickstarting than it is about the finished products? When you fund something like OUYA, you're not pre-ordering a new console that will be made and marketed, you're buying a ticket on the ride, reserving a front-row seat to the process, and endorsing an idea. It's a Like button attached to your wallet.

http://www.fastcompany.com/18430... FYI: OUYA is a video game console project

One more time. A like button attached to your wallet. I have backed 15 projects and more often than not, these are goods/services/art that I had no knowledge of and rarely a need for. My curiosity -> interest -> financial support. These projects usually fall under categories of goods that I currently spend my money on. I could go to a mall, browse Amazon, or I can visit Kickstarter.

Let's take a look at recent projects I have supported:

The Calvin & Hobbes documentary and soccer magazine fall under my entertainment budget. Pleasant Pops falls under eating out (and supporting local business). The Yarn Bin goes under gifts. Kickstarter is not forcing me to create new budget categories. Rather it is providing me with an enjoyable online experience to spend my discretionary income.

So why Facebook? Felix Salmon blogs about Bogost's post (emphasis added):

A lot of the relationship between merchants and consumers, these days, is a kind of escalating cold war: as fast as merchants’ sales techniques become increasingly sophisticated, so do consumers learn to see through them and compensate for them. If we look today at advertisements from 50 or even 20 years ago, we’re astonished that they worked at all.

And so it seems to me that Kickstarter is in some ways much like QVC was when it launched: a state-of-the-art sales and marketing platform. It’s highly social: Jeanne Pi has determined that your chances of raising $10,000 on Kickstarter are just 9% if you have 10 Facebook friends, rising to 20% if you have 100 friends, and 40% if you have 1,000 friends.

And it’s done a very good job of walking the fine line between do-gooding, on the one hand (charity campaigns are specifically banned), and overt commercialism, on the other. Many projects are rejected, and Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler is keen that everything on the site be creative, in some way, rather than just being some superficially clever gadget that you might see in the SkyMall catalogue or in a late-night infomercial. He doesn’t always succeed, but if you strip out the outliers, the big million-dollar headline-grabbers, he’s doing a better job than you might think.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-s...

Kickstarter is a state-of-the-art SOCIAL sales and marketing platform. I discovered the four projects listed above via Twitter and/or Facebook. I rarely have the time to go to Kickstarter.com and peruse all their different projects. Rather, someone on my social graph recommends a project.

Kickstarter is a filter. Salmon points out that unlike Dodge running a social campaign for their new Dart that I am prone to tune out, I am eager or at least usually willing to watch a Kickstarter video and learn about their product. Kickstarter does a good job at using my social graph to filter bad ideas.

One more time, so why Facebook?

Kickstarter + Facebook's Advertising potential = Social Commerce.

Facebook's ad revenue (and potential) is reliant on big brands allocating budget to running Facebook campaigns. Combining Facebook and Kickstarter is not a self-sustaining business. That is fine. This is a valuable business for Facebook to build upon and grow.

Evolution of a sponsored story. Take the OUYA game console as an example. Currently, OUYA has raised millions on word of mouth + tons of great press + an interesting concept. A better integrated Facebook + Kickstarter may have sped up their fundraising or helped increase their total. The OUYA story attracted more attention than money raised. The impressions generated by OUYA are valuable for major brands. A skilled "Mad Man" should be able to sell a Samsung or Activision on why they should sponsor OUYA stories on Facebook.

Imagine an advertisement, similar to a sponsored story, showing up in your feed about OUYA sponsored by Samsung. OUYA benefits by gaining additional exposure and Samsung benefits by curating content interesting to its fans (sort by Facebook users who are interested in video games).

Help brands push cool. This is one example. Brands are hungry for better content to share. Kickstarter is hungry for helping more projects get funded. Facebook has the users, platform, and advertising tools to make this work.

There are many more ideas for how this may work out. I'll end this brief thought bubble with a question asked by Om Malik to Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen (emphasis added):

I think the question or the point I was trying to make was that with the friction in the creative process going away, it’s getting harder to get people’s attention. I think Kickstarter is that platform of creativity. I think the emotional appeal of a platform is what works. I think the old-media entities still have not figured out that part of the game plan.  I see Kickstarter as coming from left field, just like Twitter siphoned attention away from established media forms and in the process became a medium of its own.

http://gigaom.com/2012/05/22/kic...

Kickstarter is built for the type of advertising that should work on Facebook. Kickstarter provides a unique tool for Facebook to train brands/old media how to reinvent advertising.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Facebook acquisitions: