A statistical analysis of my 39 Kickstarter Pledges
Recently, I find myself addicted to Kickstarter. I was talking to my friend Buster last night, and we both agreed that Kickstarter’s implementation of social functionality was nothing short of brilliant. I was going on about how much money I spend on that site, and made a mental note to actually look. I also recently read a few articles about some grumbling with people not receiving some of their pledges on time. So I decided to do some digging.
As of today, I have pledged just shy of $6,500 or $6,490, on Kickstarter projects, and paid out $4,572. Pledge totals on projects still in progress is $119. Unsuccessful projects amounted to $1,699 and I had one cancelled project at a pledge level of $100. The average project was backed at the amount of $166.41. Here’s a pie chart by dollar amount:
Dollars by Project Outcome:
The vast majority of the projects were successful. A full 85% of the projects that I pledged on resulted in successful funding.
Funded Vs Unfunded by Number of Projects:
In terms of shipping time, Kickstarter doesn’t actually know when your project ships. It only lists on your history page when the pledge was collected. It’s not practical for me to go back and figure out when things shipped, since Kickstarter doesn’t give the functionality to is project applicants to enter a ship date.
I can, however, go back and see how many shipped, and how long I’ve been waiting for the ones that haven’t shipped. And this is catastrophic: fully 67% of the projects I’ve funded and have been completed haven’t shipped and I have been waiting an average of 83 days. One project I don’t know if was delivered or not (I was promised a mural with my picture on it, and don’t know if it ever got made).
Percentage of completed projects shipped:
Now, some of these may have told me that they would be shipping later. Often a reward ends with “Shipping May 2013” for example. Kickstarter cuts off the full description, so I can’t tell but I can do a quick survey of which ones I am not yet expecting, which ones I’ve hear from, etc., to make an admittedly subjective pie chart of “percentage of projects I have no idea what’s up with.” The results are not good. I don’t know what’s up with 26% of my projects. I haven’t gotten them, and I havent gotten an update in I don’t know how long.
What’s up with my projects?
The good news, however, is that I have followed more projects over time. Over the 17 months I have been backing Kickstarter projects, I have backed an average 1.8 projects per month. However, prior to the launch of the Kickstarter “follow a friend” functionality on March 18, 2012, I followed an average of 1.3 projects per month. After the introduction, I backed an average of 2.8 - an astonishing 115% increase in number of projects backed.
Number of projects backed by month:
So there you go.
I love Kickstarter and find myself using it more and more. Their “Follow a friend” functionality kicked it into high gear. But there is a real problem on getting people to deliver on time. I don’t even know what’s up with thousands of dollars of purchases.
