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Has Kickstarter Peaked?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Kickstarter has taken off in the past year, raising big money for a wide variety of projects. Look at some of their stats: in June 2012, only seven projects raised more than a million dollars apiece; in the past nine months, another 16 projects have passed that threshold. Since the site began operations in 2009, several of the 38,000 funded projects have broken out as superstars, including the Pebble Watch and a new gaming console. With all this competition, has crowdfunding gotten, well, too crowded? Is Kickstarter peaking? As the dollar amounts have grown, so has the potential for abuse. Hidden amidst all these success stories and multi-million dollar payouts are some sadder tales. The majority of the nearly 50,000 unfunded Kickstarter projects received less than 20 precent of their funding goals, with 11 percent never even getting a single pledge."
Has "Has X peaked?" articles peaked?
Monstar L
Kickstarter itself cannot reasonably be used as source for projects to be funded. If there is a project you are potentially interested in, you have to get it from some other source. But that is fine, first and foremost, Kickstarter organizes the "business" side, having "advertising" separately is not an issue. And of course there will be a lot of projects nobody is interested in or that have unrealistic goals or are otherwise "fishy". Again, so what?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not everybody is interested in everything and I am sure there are many projects that didn't get their funding due to not being known well enough with its targetted audience.
Its not because you start a project that people should like it and fund it. Sometimes a project simply isn't good enough.
Kickstarter didn't really change anything. The success stories have been on the back of great marketing campaigns done by experienced marketeers. Hence, Elite and Ouya were able to make money, without really offering very much that couldn't have been done anyway (Braben couldn't get publisher money for Elite? Of course he could - but the Kickstarter money has fewer strings attached, and no penalty if he screws it up). Often, Kickstarters will already have funding and just need a bit more to launch - it's a pre-order system, and really does nothing to help start new ventures. And as with everything else, you need to get your head above the crowd. Not everyone can do that - by definition - so there's bound to be a majority of failures and a few stars. But the market already worked like that, so nothing has changed. Fundamentally you still need a business with a product that people want to buy, and you have to reach those people with marketing. Kickstarter doesn't help with any of that - why would it?
Saying it's "peaked" is missing the point. It assumes that Kickstarter was meant to be something it never could have been anyway. Once you ignore the hyperbole of what Kickstarter thinks it is, and look at what it actually is, there's no case to answer. It's a website serving a purpose, and that purpose hasn't gone away, but nor is it greater than what it really is
This blog reads like a huge ad for the dozen various companies that have popped up to try to leech off would-be Kickstarter project starters. Some people are obviously taking the lesson about selling mining equipment to gold diggers to heart.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Pointing the finger at under-achieving projects as evidence of some kind of peak is silly - under-publicity is more likely to be the cause there, especially for projects that get nothing at all. I seem to recall iTunes have a similar problem for a lot of it's artists, I can't find a link for it but a huge % of tracks on iTunes were reported at one time as having 0 purchases. IIRC it was something like a third. Looks like people are prematurely worrying this is a bubble, which is understandable considering the economic damage we've suffered over the past 15-20 years thanks to bubbles.
Has bitcoin peaked?
Has Apple peaked?
Has US military power peaked?
Have sales of pens peaked?
Have lazy, crappy articles peaked? Hell no, baby! This is slashdot, party like it's 1999 because we are on the shitty articles bubble!
Digg it!
No.
Seriously though, probably not. It's experiencing a dip after it's initial surge of interest. It's not a roller coaster, or a rocket, it's a company. It will have ups and downs. Demand will fluctuate over time. It can experience market saturation (those of us who have now kickstarter-ed so many projects that we need to wait for some to finish before we pay for more).
Also; what's this nonsense about 50,000 projects and not getting near their total, as if that's a bad thing. It's not a magic money tree; most of those projects probably didn't interest people, so they failed at the first hurdle. That's not a tale of woe, that's someone being saved from spending months/years of their life developing a product that wasn't going to sell.
Most projects are bad ideas or don't appeal widely enough to be worth funding. The point of Kickstarter is to cut out the middle man between people who want a product or service and people willing to provide it. It isn't meant to fund things that there is no market for, it is meant to directly connect the funding for things with the existence of a market.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I mainly pick up games on kickstarter...and initially games were pretty cheap about $5, the companies got seed money during development, and maybe I get a game...all of a sudden those games have shot up in price to $20, its gone from funding development to payment upfront...I haven't funded a game in a while.
is one of the core ideas behind Kickstarter -- all or nothing. If you can't get enough people on board for your project, you might want to rethink the viability of your project.
I think the bigger question is whether the "successful" projects can deliver on their promises. Some have done very well, others have been a mixed bag (delays, production quality issues, cost overruns), and there's many press-worthy ones from the last year or so that aren't going to ship for another year or two.
Personally, I've got a couple hundred dollars worth of "preorders" mostly for video games on Kickstarter, some of which may never see the light of day or might end up falling far short of what was promised.
Another question is the degree to which Kickstarter will become "commercialized" and less indie, in the sense that established businesses, big or small, turn to Kickstarter as a marketing tool. One one side, you have the dreamers taking on "risky" projects, some of which might fail, and your money is helping them realize that dream. Meanwhile, some of those creators may have completely oversold their ability to actually execute the project, and probably should have invested more of their own time and money doing the basic groundwork before asking others to pitch in.
On the other side, you have people creating Kickstarter projects for products that are basically 85% complete, and Kickstarter basically serves as a preorder system and/or a way to wring extra money out of people willing to pay $500 for a t-shirt and a producer credit or something.
I suppose if people want to pay PBS-pledge-drive-like amounts of money to feel like they're a part of the project, I'm not one to say that they can't or shouldn't; I do wonder how many Kickstarter projects are *misrepresenting* themselves as an effort that *needs* your money to make it happen, even when they really just want more of your money to produce something they were going to do anyway.
I'd be more inclined to be "charitable" with my pledges if I had the impression that it would make the end result materially better, rather than merely lining the pockets of the creators. Some of the projects have explicit stretch goals detailing where the extra resources could be used, like hiring voice actors, higher quality materials, etc, but those seem to be less common in some categories than others.
Agreed,
But maybe it's bad marketing, a bad idea, badly presented or whatever. If they couldn't get Kickstarter funding it means not enough people said "I want that, lets make it happen" and that means they would have died once the project was done anyway. But it doesn't necessarily mean there's no market, only that Bob's idea wasn't the right one for it.
Ouya was professional promoted. ZeFrank's new show was marketed among his followers (exactly the target market), there's more to launching a new thing, than the thing itself.
Not every project can be successfully funded.
If "the crowd" don't like your project then it's not going to be successfully funded. The site isn't an automatic "setup project receive money". The harsh reality is that most ideas don't receive funding, this is true whether the source of funds is a crowd of people or one very rich person.
a) your idea isn't very good
b) your idea isn't very well presented
c) nobody sees your idea
Blaming any of the above on the platform you use to get funded is silly.
Seriously who cares that 11% of projects got no pledges. The article implies this shows how hard it is for many to get funding. I'd suggest that it shows that it is easy to set up a kickstarter and that some people play about with it on non-serious projects etc. The utopian ideal some ascribe to Kickstarter is that it allows people to create things without having to battle through traditional funding models etc; does anyone really think that the projects that failed on Kickstarter would have had a better chance of getting funded otherwise?
Not the pop ads or TV commercial
But the kind where you know a tech journalist and he or she writes a cool story about your project. Or you have a big social media following and spread the word. Or you hire a social media specialist to spread the word
None of the successful projects got there by accident or luck
All the unfounded ones are by people who don't know anyone who could help them
The one you STILL cant get... yeah, It's not a superstar until it's available for purchase....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Kickstarter is a potential source of funding. In that respect, it isn't terribly different from partnerships, banks, and other traditional forms of investment. If you can't convince investors that your product will make it in the market, that you can produce the product, or that you have the ability to operate a business then you aren't going to convince a sane investor to give you money. Kickstarter does differ a little bit from traditional investments in that the customers are doing the investment and the return is abysmal, but the risk is still there.
There are a lot of outstanding KickStarter projects that are being waited on. Assuming these projects start to finish and depending on the quality of the end-products, the people waiting and other people watching will start to reinvest into other projects.
Society as a whole isn't going to just keep throwing money at a relatively new idea until I gets more "proven".
You mean that Kickstarter is so popular nobody goes there anymore?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Brian on "Family Guy" have a girlfriend that ended every sentence with the inflection of a question.
Anyway, that's what I think of when I see these "articles": a ditzy cartoon blond.
that's not much of anything is it...
The biggest issue I have is it is nigh impossible to easily find projects of interest. Often by the time I find them they are already funded or all the early adopter pricing is gone. I really don't want to do multiethnic searches with many non relevant results to find something worth funding.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Can someone explain to me how you browse projects on kickstarter?
When I click on "Technology" I have an option to chose either "staff picks" or "popular this week", or "recently funded".
What about browsing non staff picked/recently funded/popular? How do I find those?
Could that be the reason that some project don't get a single contribution?
For the most part, this is a blanket article describing the pitfalls of crowdfunding. When you put a bunch of neophyte entrepreneurs in touch with a bunch of neophyte funding sources, there will be these problems. Are these unique to Kickstarter? No. You will find these same pitfalls in startups funded in a variety of other loosely regulated ways, and even in the more tightly regulated ones. Run of the mill fraud, charlatanism, misappropriation, theft, and a host of other abuses abound in "real" business as well.
Have these problems become more prevalent and widespread recently within the crowdfunding universe? I don't know, and clearly neither do the authors. If the article is asking whether Kickstarter has peaked, then they ought to, just maybe, provide some data illustrating trends in time. What would be great would be to present a graph of some measure, climbing upward over time, and then starting a recent decline, leaving some sort of PEAK in the shape of the graph!
A collection of anecdotes - either of success or failure - is not data.
There are a hundred different, quantitative ways that one might try to gauge whether Kickstarter has peaked, and the author produced not a single one. Has there been a downward trend in the number of new projects, or the total portfolio value of all currently open projects? Has the total value of all funded projects in the last month, quarter, or year gone down? Has Kickstarter's business revenue started to decline? Has there been an increase in the percentage of unfunded projects? Has there been an increase in the number of "fraudulent" projects (however you manage to define it)? What is the mean time from funding to completion, and from completion to the delivery of the rewards? Have those mean times been inching upwards? What percentage of funded projects remain incomplete, i.e., have yet to deliver their rewards? Has that number been trending upwards? Have any lawsuits been filed that present an existential threat to Kickstarter or crowdfunding in general?
And, if any of these potentially negative trends are occurring, are they a sign of Kickstarter being in decline, or simply encountering growing pains are crowdfunding enters the mainstream?
I confess I'm not much of an expert on Kickstarter, but they only get their fee if the project is at least 100% funded, right? Isn't it possible that people are artificially inflating their targets to account for that?
There was a time when a virtual nobody could get funding to pay for a project but now its become a cash cow. Big named people jumped on the wagon and trying to get big named projects funded (particularly in the game arena) and that goes against what KS is supposed to be. And I see people use it wanting money to send their kids to a camp, people wanting money to fund a tv show comeback, wanting money to make a game from an established and well known studio that is already making other games, and etc.
KS is just a source of cash now, its like a cash register waiting to be rung and that's it. Besides, I don't know who the hell would give someone money to a nobody for a product that isn't created yet and with no guarantees. People love to give a little money to someone because it makes them feel good about themselves, but the problem is with KS chances are your being scammed. Scammers will flock to things like this. What is their only obligation? Nothing that's what. Or they just throw together some cheap ass piece of junk and send it to the top 5 contributors and boom their obligation is done and they walk away with 20,000 grand and only spend maybe 50 bucks while the contributors feel all happy and special the KS runner is laughing his ass off at the suckers.
It was ruined by popularity
Deal with it and move on, this is a development that cannot be stopped unless we get a pandemic.
See subject line.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Digg/Reddit/Twitter all have the same common problems as Kickstarter. When they started there was a small but dedicated community. Now that each has hit a critical mass point when everyone wants their message to be heard. In Kickerstarter's case the message is 'give me money to build XYZ product.' But there is so much static (junk postings or just bad ideas) that they're downing out the good stuff. And much like Digg/Reddit/Twitter there are scammers or people with good intentions but woefully underestimate the undertaking.
The only way around this to put a cap on the number of Kickstarters that can be posted a day. They have an approval system like /. but so many people are submitting so much now its easy for a bad project to slip through.
My suggestion is for Kickstarter to add a Firehouse system, like Slashdot, and require a business plan with all projects. If the money goes south then the investor know who to call.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Same thing with Ouya also.
From the Ouya webite - "OUYAâ(TM)s first consoles will ship in early 2013." It's end of march. Time to change the line to - "OUYAâ(TM)s first consoles will ship in *mid* 2013."
When a Kickstarter project for a bold and ambitious project from Green Ronin, a publisher with a proven track record for making great products, is struggling to meet a reasonable target, I'm left wondering the same thing. Even more so when it's Freeport for Pathfinder ( http://kck.st/Z3Gu3l ), a product with a decade of background for the now de facto D&D game setting. How does that struggle to meet its pledge goal? It should be a slam dunk, IMHO.
I'm sure Kickstarter will still have significant successes but I think it's entering a new era where worthy projects struggle. I hope I'm wrong, however. Projects like Freeport are damn cool and wouldn't be possible without something like Kickstarter so it'd be nice for it to work out for them.
what a particular company or organization does. "Kickstarter" isn't exactly a household name.
First line of article re-write: "Kickstarter, an online pledge system for funding creative projects, has really taken off in the past year, raising big money for a wide variety of projects."
Yeah! How fare they assume that people on Slashdot read Slashdot and know what Slashdot has been talking about incessantly for the last year.
I'm sorry if you just joined the site or something, but there comes a certain point where you have to stop explaining the really basic stuff in every single article.
Next on Slashdot! General Electric (an American company known for producing a wide range of electric devices) is releasing a new toaster (a device for toasting (browning or melting with the application of heat) bread (a food substance made from baked wheat)) and we seek to answer the question, can it run (synonym for executing code) Linux (a FOSS (free and open source) Unix (OS (abbreviation for operating system, a collection of software that manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs) originally developed by Bell Labs (a former division of AT&T (another American company)))-like OS)?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Seriously.
So, 11% of ideas were so bad (either inherently, or the execution of their campaigns) that they didn't get a single pledge. You mean Kickstarter isn't just a faucet for the infinite pile of money stored in the magic cloud?
Taking the briefest of looks at the article, I see roughly 38,000 projects funded so far, and a shade under 50,000 not (or not yet) funded. That's a success rate of better than forty percent. (If you drop all of the egregiously dumb ideas, joke build-the-Death-Star campaigns, and other totally unfundable crap, that means that something like half of all the projects having any merit whatsoever are managing to get all of the money that they were looking for.) I had no idea that Kickstarter actually worked so well. Is this 'article' actually some sort of guerilla marketing move?
~Idarubicin
I personally have never really cared for begstarter
With a few exceptions, every single project I've seen on there either:
1. Hasn't been worth funding
2. Has been pushed up by someone/company that has more than enough money and is just pandering for more greedily.
I'm really getting sick of being linked to it over and over again.
This is a service which has been able to large scale investors before, but not to end users/consumers/what you want to call us.
The "service" of not having your money kick in until enough of others' people money can be a clause in an investment deal, true. BUT, Kickstarter has nothing to do with investing. Kickstarter is NOT investing in any way, shape, or form. It's irresponsible to suggest that Kickstarter is investing because so many uneducated people would believe you.
I don't respond to AC's.
I don't think it has peaked, but rather found its niche. Indiegogo and smaller site are more for altruistic/angel lending (early concept, no IP, business plan), whereas Kickstarter has become more of a series b funder where concepts now have distributors, manufactures, and beta designs already completed.
So, did your mom do a lot of drugs when she was pregnant?
Indeed, I'll sign up in a heartbeat as soon as you show me your very own KS is backed by an ethical bank.
As I'm not sure all of you know what it is, let's say these are very difficult to find (there is only one in my country*); in general they are non-profit banking associations thaf obviously won't even think about playing on stock exchanges.
And yes they run, reasonably, and more importantly, in a very robust way.
A Kickstarter launched by one such bank, I'd just love. I'd not invest in it: I'd donate. Yes.
(*) in France: Credit Cooperatif. Been here for 10 years now.
Herve S.
So sites can defiantly peak. Slashdot BI is BS.
Some projects ask for way to much. Ive seen some bands say things like we need money for our new album, shirts & merch, put out the first single on 7", new bass amp and new tour van or trailer. Those project always fail, I want to buy the album, maybe a shirt at some time but not fund the bands entire existence. .
You're incorrect. No pledges are actually charge unless TWO conditions are met:
(a) project meets or exceeds funding goal
(b) (a) occurs before END of pledge term
So, amazon does NOT charge UNTIL (a) & (b) happen and then the charge is made AT the END of a SUCCESSFUL KS "campaign".
If a project FAILS to meet it's funding goals in the time allotted OR is cancelled no charges were EVER made to be refunded in the first place.
This is NOT like indiegogo and some of the other sites where a charge is made as soon as it is pledged, and who also don't do anything one way or the other IF the campaign contribution target is NOT reached...
i.e. fix your damned article
I tell you /. is becoming more and more of tabloid by the picosecond...
That seems to be the case unfortunately.
It's run a bit like a very far out pre-order launch, where you have to advertise all of the great things people will get in the box, assuming you can build it.
Being Chris Taylor of gas powered games and having a video out there where you're on the verge of tears saying if you don't get this money you have to shut the company down, and how you don't think you're going to make funding goals etc. etc. may all be perfectly honest. But that's not a good business strategy.
Which is, as I say, unfortunate. Now you're selling your companies time with a product pitch to the public rather than a bank. It does leave a lot of people with good projects and not enough start up money without the ability to get enough startup money to advertise to get kickstarter funding. Which seems wrong in a lot of ways.
There is the story of an incredibly rich woman using a 'kickstarter' to send her daughter to 'RPG design camp'. The woman has a background in PR campaigns in the IT business, and has complete understanding of how you manipulate the nerd culture, and play on the old "too few women in IT" theme.
As a psychopath, she sees operations like Kickstarter as a bunch of vulnerable, socially malfunctioning idiots ripe for the plucking. Her only question is "how much money can I get these suckers to give me while having a minimal chance of being prosecuted for any financial crime?"
She spammed her 'sob' story everywhere where idiots fall over themselves to be politically correct, and turned the original request for around $900 into a $20,000 pot of free cash. Remember, this women is a multi-millionaire and a PR specialist. Her request broke all the rules of Kickstarter, but the Kickstarter peeps said they didn't care, since it was about helping a little girl advance in IT. Nerds are far to dumb to understand why rules and laws protect us against the sharks.
It is notable that Kickstarter recently gained the attention of many rich game developers who, after having a lot of Kickstarter success, suddenly had a prick of conscience (and a word with decent lawyers), which led to them cancelling any attempt at Kickstarter funding.
Kickstarter is a great idea ONLY if it never falls prey to criminals exploiting POLITICALLY CORRECT impulses found in too many of the people at the 'top' of the IT business. Kickstarter should have cast iron rules, and ruthlessly throw out abusers, even if the abuser appears to be a one-legged, AIDS suffering little orphan girl with one year to live.
The irony of life is that the people with real sob stories have to much pride and Humanity to exploit this sad fact of their existence. Meanwhile the rich and powerful have no conscience whatsoever, and their kids are just another tool to be used to grab more money.
The failure of bad ideas forebodes what exactly? Oh right, this is a slashdot story summary designed to feed the gerbils.
So much fail, so little time.
Putting a project on Kickstarter doesn't mean it'll magically get cash. It has to have a few things:
1) It has to be something people actually want. Just because you think your idea is really cool, doesn't mean that anyone else does. If people don't want it, then they aren't going to fund it. This can be a real issue as many people seem to think a knockoff or redo is something that people should get all excited about. So it has to be something of interest first and foremost, or it'll never happen.
2) People have to think you can deliver. If you have no credentials and look all disorganized, they won't feel confident their money will be well spent, and thus won't contribute. You have to be able to convince people that you can do what you say you can do. This is why projects that are done by known names (like videogames done by studios with a number of titles behind them) or projects that already have prototypes tend to have an easier time getting funding. People see that there is ability to deliver.
3) You have to get the word out. Some people sniff around Kickstarter every day, looking for stuff to fund. Most don't. They have to get notified about it. So they have to read about it on a website they look at. Publicity matters, if you don't have it, people will just never know, and thus will not contribute.
So it's all kinds of not surprising that many projects don't get funded. I've looked at plenty of projects and said "No thanks." Either I decided that it wasn't something I'd be interested in having, or I did not feel confident that they could deliver.
The 'mom' was never pregnant. It just divided. Unfortunately the other half got all the DNA!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I won't believe Kickstarter has peaked until Netcraft confirms it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
in a otherwise free market people choose to fund that which they want to succeed. The projects that received money are mostly:
1) Something many people want;
2) Well publicized by their developers;
3) Presented by people with recognized skills that are capable of ensuring they're completed.
The rest of the project are stupid ideas, ideas that are interesting but unlikely to be delivered, presented by untrustworthy people.
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