Huge congrats to Kickstarter on their 2nd anniversary, and I love that they published so much interesting data about the funded projects in the past year. But I wasn’t really a fan of their pie chart (where all the slices were equal), since we know (from their own commentary!) that some slices are more equal than others. So I took the liberty of shuttling all the data they shared about projects in the past year into a Google Doc, and calculated some averages and made some better graphs. I’ve published the spreadsheet and charts. Some interesting things… Cultcha! Film & Video + Music = 55.7% of funds raised. Design and Tech = bigger budgets. Average raise / funded project for those two were much higher than other categories. Were there outliers that screwed the averages? Tech backers spend the most. Average kick per backer was $119 for tech projects. Kickstarter’s sitting on some really interesting data…especially about project funding patterns and pricing tiers. Averages only tell you a little tiny, tiny slice of the story; would love to see some time series data that looks at the psychology of funding behavior. For example, is there a “best time” for big backers to show up on the board to drive volume of smaller pledges? What’s the optimal pricing curve for pledge tiers by category? Etc., etc.

Huge congrats to Kickstarter on their 2nd anniversary, and I love that they published so much interesting data about the funded projects in the past year. But I wasn’t really a fan of their pie chart (where all the slices were equal), since we know (from their own commentary!) that some slices are more equal than others. So I took the liberty of shuttling all the data they shared about projects in the past year into a Google Doc, and calculated some averages and made some better graphs. I’ve published the spreadsheet and charts.

Some interesting things…

  • Cultcha! Film & Video + Music = 55.7% of funds raised.
  • Design and Tech = bigger budgets. Average raise / funded project for those two were much higher than other categories. Were there outliers that screwed the averages?
  • Tech backers spend the most. Average kick per backer was $119 for tech projects.

Kickstarter’s sitting on some really interesting data…especially about project funding patterns and pricing tiers. Averages only tell you a little tiny, tiny slice of the story; would love to see some time series data that looks at the psychology of funding behavior. For example, is there a “best time” for big backers to show up on the board to drive volume of smaller pledges? What’s the optimal pricing curve for pledge tiers by category? Etc., etc.