Kickstarter on Wednesday announced it has added a Video Mode for its site. The new view essentially presents all the video content uploaded to the site from live projects in full screen.
Kickstarter says it has seen over 75,000 project videos uploaded to the site since it launched in 2009 (in fact, the site has over 94,000 projects). It thus makes sense that the company is focusing on that user experience (I’ll personally admit that I’ll often just click on a Kickstarter link to watch the video).
The company explains its reasoning behind the move:
From day one, we’ve been blown away by the amazing videos you’ve created — from the singer Allison Weiss setting the standard early on, to the incredible Wes Anderson spoof the Inman Park Squirrel Census produced, and all of the amazing “Oh hey, I didn’t see you there” videos. For a long time we’ve been wanting to find a good way to show these off, so people could explore projects through the medium of video.
The goal with Video Mode is thus to offer a new way for users to discover projects. If you like what you see, you can click the “Explore this Project” button and read what it’s all about. Otherwise, you can just hit the “Something different” button.
Assuming that users get hooked by this new feature, it should be a big boon for projects as it will drive more traffic to their project pages. Kickstarter will naturally want to track what percentage of funding comes from video mode and promote it accordingly if it’s successful.
Curiously, the hidden Lean Back Mode has disappeared. Previously, users could simply hit their up button on Kickstarter.com and get access to something similar to Video Mode, but it may have been succeeded with today’s launch.
We have contacted Kickstarter about this change and will update you if we hear back.
Update at 3:00PM EST: Kickstarter has confirmed Video Mode has replaced Lean Back Mode.
Top Image credit: Gary Scott
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