We live in a world of short attention spans. Our food is fast, our entertainment on-demand and the phrase “interrupt-driven” dominates everything.
The world of media and entertainment is no different from any other. We consume in bites, when we want, as we want. My kids don’t watch a TV show every week for a season, they watch a season of episodes in a week.
On-demand.
Enter Veronica Mars and Torment: Tides of Numenera. A movie and a video game. Both were incredibly successful Kickstarter deals in the entertainment space, raising $5,702,153 and $4,188,927 respectively in mere days from a combined 165,990 people.
The success of Veronica Mars demonstrated the authority of the major studios has been whacked significantly, while the well-choreographed success of Torment set a new standard for how to create a sticky and engaging crowd-funded campaign.
I can’t wait to see the Veronica Mars movie or get my hands on the Tides of Numenera. But I will.
Neither of these projects will be delivered for at least 12 months after their initial Kickstarter date. That’s a long time in an era of squirrel distractions.
While Amazon is giving us free overnight shipping and Prime, Kickstarter is giving us an electronic version of the Sears & Roebuck Catalog. And it works. It’s called anticipation.
Is this the end of the “build it and they will come” age? I don’t believe that two make a trend, but it does appear the “crowd-fund it first, build it later” age is coming into its own.
While we may have short attention spans, we don’t mind having a distant mountain ahead to remind us of what we will be enjoying next year.
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