I’ve gotten a lot of emails/DM’s today about Lore being #3 on the Hot List and folks wondering…

Why?

First and foremost, the function of the Hot List is to try and guess popularity of a project based on a set of ever changing values. Because I made an intentional decision to try and not base Hot List rankings on just money or backers, this puts extra weight on things like day-to-day discussion on the project page as it compares to their overall count of backers (so project owners, talk to your backers – but that’s a discussion for another time).

Part of the reason Lore jumped so high the past couple days is because they had a huge jump in traffic both on their project page and on Kicktraq from being featured on Forbes.com, discussions on the latest RockPaperShotgun Kickstarter Katchup, on twitter, and across other sites as a result of being dubbed “The Most Entertaining Kickstarter Project Of All Time“. In addition, Lore has also had quite a flurry of comments on their project page which jumped their comments per backer ratio, another factor in their ranking.

Good, bad, or indifferent – while Lore doesn’t have any real growth of their project, they have gained quite a bit of traffic and discussion the past couple days even if not for the most positive reasons. However, lack of pledge/backer growth should begin to work against a project when the current social/traffic factors are weighted down from lack of additional growth.

Hope that clears things up, and as always, feel free to contact me if you have questions. Happy to help!