A Prefundia article discusses the popularity ranking algorithms. I've known for awhile how powerful $1 backers are for project exposure, which is why I often included a $1 tier (Offering inclusion in the credits) in the rewards structures I've helped engineered. Kickstarters other ranking, "By Magic", is something I haven't tried to reverse-engineer yet.We received quite a number of messages throughout the campaign blatantly offering us the ability to “buy” $1 backers, in batches of several hundred. Several of these also explained KickStarter’s ‘popularity’ algorithm, or at least their theory of it. We can’t tell you if this scam works, because our response every time was to report each message as spam – but at least one message was directly from someone who HAD a successful KickStarter campaign, and who had raised quite a bit of money too, so these weren't all shady looking fly-by-nighters.
Buying $1 backers can REALLY stand out on my graphs. Lost Homeland was suspended.
http://i.imgur.com/dHtWlWq.png
On September 28th 2014 there was a jump from 5 to 40 unallocated backers. The next day saw 79 new unallocated backers. At its peak 282 (86.71%) of its 329 total backers were unallocated on October 4th. October 5th had 144 backers evaporate, but then it began to rise back up to 169 unallocated backers until it was suspended on October 15th. I had looked at the backers tab and many of the accounts were both newly created without locations and just common first names for English speakers.
That Ascent post-mortem also mentions accusations project creators receive of making big pledges to their own campaigns with alternate accounts and then withdrawing them later. I've suspected seeing this multiple times in my graphs. It is usually done slowly after the project has reached 100%. I am not accusing Pantheon of doing this, but its $10,000 tier in the "Amount pledged by tier over time" graph is what such a thing visually looks like.
http://i.imgur.com/QrWzzn6.png
Back when Ouya was doing Kickstarter pledge-matching with its Ouya-Free-The-Games-Fund there were multiple campaigns that potentially did this. It was something to talk about back in 2013. The normal disincentive for project creators to pledge to their own campaign is losing a portion to the fees. They would lose some of their money. There are situations such as almost missing a goal where it is economically worth it for the project creator to sneak in pledges to their own project. When Ouya was matching pledges, the matching compensated far greater than the amount lost to fees. The minimum requirements were also so relaxed that something quickly slapped together and labelled a "video game" could try to scam the fund.
Ascent's graph for pledges is very heavily weighted towards the higher end of the rewards structure.
http://i.imgur.com/THReqlC.png
