I recently came across Dan Misener’s article "Kickstarter hides failure," where he talked about how crowdfunding site Kickstarter makes it difficult for you to see/find failed projects. They intentionally prevent failed campaigns from being indexed by the search engines (through “noindex” robot meta tags).
Dan’s article got quite a bit of attention. And in his follow-up post, he posed some interesting questions that led me to do some investigations of my own. Questions like:
- What is the percentage of successful vs. failed projects?
- Of all the money pledged, how much actually went to successful projects?
- Which categories have a higher percentage of success?
- Which categories get the most funding?
- Which categories have the most project submissions and therefore more competitive (for funding dollars)?
- What kind of projects are people more interested in backing?
- Is there an optimal campaign duration?
- Do you have a better chance at a successful campaign starting with a lower or higher funding goal (regardless of how much you actually need)? And what is that number?
To get these questions answered, I had a scraper script written (not by me) that was able to scrape all the projects as of June 2, 2012, including those that failed to achieve their funding goal. I was able to scrape a total of 45,815 projects.
With these numbers in hand, I was able to create the infographic below, which provides insights that were previously unavailable. Now you get to see the whole picture, not just the picture of success.
Like Dan, I believe there’s value in understanding failure … and in this case, failure to get fully-funded in a Kickstarter campaign.
This story originally appeared on AppsBlogger.com and is republished here with permission.
Jeanne Pi is a serial entrepreneur and runs the blog AppsBlogger.com, which focuses on marketing, PR, and business building with a slant towards mobile apps.