Relating Kickstarter Project Backers to Money Raised for Projects

Aiden Jung, Matthew Gao, Trung Le
2/22/22

Background

  • Kickstarter is a public benefit company that encourages crowdfunding for creative projects.

  • We will be looking at important statistics for each Kickstarter project: a goal, the number of backers (donators), and the total amount pledged to the project.

  • We hypothesize that there is direct correlation between the number of backers to a project and the amount pledged to that project.

  • To perform our tests, we cleaned the data, tidied it, performed a linear regression test, and used data vis (a scatterplot).

Hypothesis

  • Given a linear regression equation of y_hat = B_0 + B_1 * x…

  • H_o : B_1 = 0

  • H_a : B_1 > 0

Distribution of Number of Backers for Each Project

plot of chunk figures-sideplot of chunk figures-side

Scatterplot with Single Regression Line

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-4


Call:
lm(formula = pledged ~ ln, data = kickstarter_cleaned)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-118703  -39486  -12516   21719 6038202 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) -47992.4     1607.0  -29.86   <2e-16 ***
ln           23969.3      437.1   54.84   <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 120000 on 17694 degrees of freedom
  (2936 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared:  0.1453,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.1452 
F-statistic:  3007 on 1 and 17694 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16
  • Residuals:
    • Median: -12516
    • 25%-75%: [-39486, 21719]
    • Adjusted R-squared: 0.1452
    • Coefficient of ln: 23969.3
    • p < 2.2e-16

Conclusions

  • With a p-value of 2.2e-16 < 0.05, we reject H_o that B_1 = 0. There is a clear relationship between the number of backers to a Kickstarter project and the amount of money pledged to that project.

  • We encountered some limitations:

    • We tried to compare the number of backers to the ratio of pledged money to the target goal that the project specified.
    • For some dumb reason, a handful of campaigns listed their goal as $1 and managed to raise thousands of dollars, skyrocketing these ratios. When plotting it with ggplot, we got some really out-of-wack visualizations.

Credits & Resources