How multimedia shape crowdfunding outcomes: The overshadowing effect of images and videos on text in campaign information

This study aims to explore the moderating effect of the number of images and videos on the relationship between text length in crowdfunding campaign descriptions and crowdfunding outcomes. We use data from 13,622 technology campaigns on the Kickstarter website to test our hypotheses. The findings indicate that an increased number of images and videos improves fundraising performance but weakens the positive effect of description length on the fundraising performance of technology campaigns. In other words, on the Kickstarter website, we find an overshadowing effect between multimedia. The term “overshadowing effect” proposed in this paper suggests that redundant media can obscure the effect of other media in working memory. This study is among the first to explore the interaction between multimedia types from the theoretical perspective of cognitive load.