Live data from Hacker News

Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

kickstarter.com

31–40 of 70 posts

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#31
post #2

That's a pretty website. I was impressed by the animations. What is the term for these kinds of slideshow-like sites?

That was simple one-page website with good transitions.

I didn't much like how the first graph built up while scrolling, iirc other sites normally make the graph static to the page while its built up during scroll. This one the graph was moving across my screen as it assembled, quite awkward.

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#33

"A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?. A billion dollars."

"No, it’s not. It’s not cool. I think being a wealthy member of the establishment is the antithesis of cool. Being a countercultural revolutionary is cool. So to the extent that you’ve made a billion dollars, you’ve probably become uncool."

- Sean Parker's response to his portrayal

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#34
post #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.

Or if not the poor, then the people with extra time on their hands and means to create compelling videos for interesting projects, and if not to feed anyone, then to allow allow them to work on creating something people with disposible income find interesting enough to sponsor as an artistic project or product pre-order. But yeah. Freedom and luxury lets some people and society accumulate disposible income and focus it on discretionary products. A billion dollars by 5.7 million people is $350 per person. Great that 0.1% (5.7 million people) have that kind of cash. Doesn't say much about whether 99.9% of people have any, or show that those $350 are a worthwhile cause for the 99.9% of people who aren't donating.

This isn't to take anything away from Kickstarter - I think it's great. But let's have some perspective.

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#35
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.

Keep in mind that correlation is not causation. :-) (disclaimer: I work at kickstarter)

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#36
Tangential.. Kickstarter mentioned influential contributors but for whatever reason didn't give links to their backed project and I was particularly curious about what projects Neil Gaiman had backed. They weren't kidding, he's quite the prolific backer! https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/108204027

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#37
post #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.

I wonder how long they'll keep with Amazon as payment processor

On the other hand, tons of people have Amazon accounts and using Amazon as a payment processor is really easy. I've only backed a handful of projects (https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/1482970964), but I was shocked at how simple it was to do so: click "okay" on Amazon, enter a password, and it's done.

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#38
post #35
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.

Keep in mind that correlation is not causation. :-) (disclaimer: I work at kickstarter)

I found it curious that it correlates to the middle of the work week plus basically the middle of the month!

Re: Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges

#39
post #35
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.

Keep in mind that correlation is not causation. :-) (disclaimer: I work at kickstarter)

Indeed. But still, somehow I think it makes sense to consider such stats, especially if differences are quite big between contributions on eg, Wednesday compared to Saturday/Sunday. In any case, I would love to see more of these statistics. It seems like an interesting piece of information that can help understand how crowd-sourcing "ticks".
Post reply on HN