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Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

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Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#21
post #18

These stats can actually be quite useful if you ever decide to create a project on Kickstarter. For example, most of the money is granted on Wednesdays and between 10 and 15th of the month, so you can plan your funding cycle accordingly and increase marketing efforts during this period.

Not _most_ of the money, a tiny fraction more on average, and they give no confidence intervals or measure of variability so I'd bet it's just noise (if you pick ten random numbers, one of them has to be the highest).

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#22
post #20

Wonder how much of this 1 billion actually successfully resulted in backer rewards and wasn't indefinitely borrowed/outright stolen. Just recently a webcomic artist John Campbell who raised $50000 wrote a long screed telling his backers that they will never get the book they paid for. And a lot of projects get completely forgotten about after they get fully funded.

I realize it's hip to bash on Kickstarter, but in my experience it works out well all the time. I've backed 28 funded projects: of those only one is currently past their delivery date (the Almond+) and they've been very good about updates. Other projects have also been late, sometimes by six months, but they all get delivered.

I tend to think of Kickstarter schedules like I think of software developer schedules: double it and add 3. Planning is hard, and for a lot of the creators it there first attempt at a large project.

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#23

I would love to know what the successful payout total is.

That would be a much more useful figure. The only stats I can find are here[1] but it just lists the number of successful projects not how much was pledged to them. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

EDIT: Oops, there page actually lists $859M as the amount successfully funded!

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#24

I would love to know what the successful payout total is.

This is posted on our public stats page, which is updated every couple of hours:

https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

Lifetime, 86% of money pledged has been to funded projects ($859 million as of this writing). Just 12% has been to unsuccessfully funded projects. (The remaining money is currently live and its outcome undetermined.) The degree to which pledges are truly all or nothing has always surprised us. 80% of projects that raise 20% of their goal are eventually funded. It's a highly efficient system.

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#26
post #20

Wonder how much of this 1 billion actually successfully resulted in backer rewards and wasn't indefinitely borrowed/outright stolen. Just recently a webcomic artist John Campbell who raised $50000 wrote a long screed telling his backers that they will never get the book they paid for. And a lot of projects get completely forgotten about after they get fully funded.

Almost certainly an astonishingly high percentage of it. You hear about the bad stuff, but by and large it works. A lot of projects get delayed and some don't work out as expected, but very few could be classified as "stolen". Even in your example, many people did get the book. No one got the book they paid for since that's not how Kickstarter works (it's not a store).

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#27
That's pretty impressive. Kickstarter has a 5% fee (and Amazon their own processing fee) which means ~$50m in revenue for Kickstarter and $25M in revenue over the last year. I wonder how long they'll keep with Amazon as payment processor, it seems like they're leaving a lot of money on the table.

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#28
Off topic but looking at the map, it validates the old libertarian axiom that the more liberties, the more prosperous the economy, the more donations for utilitarian causes.

Who will feed the poor? Liberty will.

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#29
post #13

I skimmed over the map to find some interesting data: * Averages are close to $200 per backer * USA has $175 avg per backer, but makes 2/3 of that $1B * The middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Koeweit, ..) spends $400 up to almost $800 per backer * Antartica has 11 backers @ $337/backer :-) 4th place, after the middle east, After that, Norway ($280), Belgium ($250) Would be interesting to plot this data against the numbe…

I was looking how to skim the data and I couldn't find a way.

Yes, it would be interesting to see the spending per capita & how it correlates to GDP.

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