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Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see how celebrity doesn't necessarily lead to huge wins on KS. Veronica Mars raised almost $3MM on day 1. Melissa Joan Hart launched a Kickstarter over a week ago and was met with a very weak response, $$30K over two weeks.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/318676760/darcis-walk-of...

Zach Braff has more indie cred, but lacks the cult following Veronica Mars had. If Braff stalls at around $1MM and MJH's maxes out at $50K, I wonder if that will be the last we see of celebrities for a while? It must be a pretty huge blow to the ego seeing that your celebrity isn't quite as bankable as you hoped.

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Celebrity is more or less orthogonal, I think.

Obviously being well-known is important, but it's about reputation more than anything. Zach has a reputation for have a strong creative hand in film and tv projects which have had a very strong connection with fans, as his work on Garden State has demonstrated. The same goes with the Veronica Mars team. Had Rob Thomas or Kristen Bell tried to use Kickstarter for some non-Veronica Mars related project they may not have received as much enthusiasm, because Veronica Mars as a project and as an entity on its own definitely has fans and definitely engenders a significant amount of trust that they'll deliver a product that is worth the investment.

Also, I don't think you have any concept of Zach Braff's reputation or following, and I suspect this project will probably exceed its goal faster than the Veronica Mars project did.

Fair points, I'm not a huge Garden State fan and always saw Scrubs as an ensemble more than his starring vehicle. I can see that he's got a lot of Reddit cred and an enthusiastic twitter following. Will be interesting to see where it ends up.

Zach has a huge following on the internet, his reddit AMAs have over 10,000 comments (makes them some of the most popular) and he has almost 200,000 comment karma just from them. Photos and clips from Scrubs are a daily occurrence on reddit and he has an engaged Twitter following. Melissa Hart by comparison is relatively unknown, her Twitter followers don't seem to be engaged at all with 10 - 40 retweets per tweet and Zach has anywhere from 200 to 2000 for his tweets. He's in a different league to her and that doesn't even consider that ZB has a previous successful project, a cast of people that also have a big following and the project looks cool.

It's not just celebrity. Melissa Joan Hart's project just doesn't seem like it has much thought to it. "Oh they can do it for Veronica Mars, so let me do it too." The project video wasn't great. Plus the premise isn't known at all -- not saying a movie about "Clarissa Explains It All" would be successful, but it would have been more successful.

Someone at my work jumped out of her seat when I mentioned the Veronica Mars project to her. Zach Braff might not have the cult following, but at least he has the Reddit community and Scrubs/Garden State fans to at least get him to reach his goal. Many of the perks for the Veronica Mars project were filled quickly, which slowed down the funding after the big spike, so we'll see what happens with Zach Braff's movie.

Agree that it's not just celebrity - it's also campaign on Kickstarter. He's not offering as many obvious reward tiers (download, DVD) which are more tempting for backers which Veronica Mars did have.

True, good point.

Melissa Joan Hart also gained a fair amount of negative press for herself during election season, which probably has something to do with the less-than-thrilled response. She lost a lot of Twitter followers, and that was probably her main announcement vector.

He's quite active on "the internet" I believe, shouldn't be a problem even without cult following. But who knows. And I still think they shouldn't be on Kickstarter.. those are not indie movies in any way.

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