Kickstarter has had an amazing past few years! They’ve gone from an obscure website where you can raise funds for a project to a world-renown household name. It’s been exciting to watch and even more fun to blog about.
When Kickstarter hit the $1 billion pledged mark in March of 2014, they released some awesome statistics. From the image below, it appears as though they are experiencing exponential growth.
In an effort to shed some light on one of the major rewards-based crowdfunding websites, I decided to do a napkin analysis of their progress since launching on April 28, 2009 at 4:30pm (source).
If you’d like to see where I got my data, I’ve linked to the annual sources below.
2009: Pledge estimation from monthly pledge graph in this article.
2010: Pledge numbers come from this article.
2011: Pledge numbers are from this blog post.
2012: Pledge stats are from this Kickstarter year end report.
2013: Pledge numbers are from this Kickstarter year end report.
2014: Pledge numbers are from this Kickstarter year end report.
From the graph above, you can see that the platform appears to have experienced a huge jump in public awareness around 2011/2012. I think this is mainly because of some of the wildly successful and interesting projects on the platform. Also, as social media matured (facebook, twitter, etc), it made it easier for projects to spread!
This graph tells a little bit of a different story than the one at the begging of this blog post. From this image, it appears as though Kickstarter’s year-on-year growth is slowing by a decent amount.
Taking a look at backer growth
My numbers were largely taken from the same sources.
As one might expect, the chart for backer growth mirrors the growth in pledges. Unless there was a change in the average amount that backers pledged, I think you would expect that.
Similarly, it seems as though the backer growth from year to year is slowing on Kickstarter.
Take a look a project creation growth
Again, my numbers were taken from the same sources, though some are estimates because Kickstarter only gives the number of successful projects and a success rate.
I was really looking forward to this part of the analysis. I’ve always wondered whether the platform becoming more competitive and there are more projects chasing fewer dollars than previously. Although this is a crude analysis because it’s skewed by the incredibly successful projects, I’ve attached stats regarding the average pledge/backer below, which seems to have gone up.
Remember, Kickstarter is a marketplace business made up of backers and supporters. Although there is similarity between the project created chart and the others, as you will see from the chart below, there is less growth from year to year, which surprises me.
The chart above doesn’t make as much sense to me as the other charts. Before I get into why, I want to say that going from 480 million in pledges to 529 million is much harder than going from 28 million to 99 million. I would expect the growth rate to be less as Kickstarter matures.
Once people know about you, you find yourself constrained by the marketplace. The only way to expand it to go to new locations, come up with superior technology, or new products.
For example, once everyone is on Facebook, and is receiving advertisements, the growth will naturally slow, and the company will have to find new products or educate more about their existing products. This is why they are going into new industries like virtual reality to attempt to maintain their pace of growth.
However, the chart above seems to indicate slowing growth on relatively small numbers of project creators. Don’t get me wrong, 50k+ projects created on Kickstarter in a year is awesome! But considering entrepreneurship and creative activity at large, it’s a very small number.
Although Kickstarter is not for everyone, I suspect this is because most people don’t know about the benefits of launching a crowdfunding campaign, or even what crowdfunding is.
I think that a lot of people in the popular categories industries like gaming, technology/design, and film know what Kickstarter is, but it’s unlikely that there is familiarity of the concept in less popular categories.
At the same time, it might be a good thing that Kicsktarter is growing more slowly among project creators. It helps cut down on competition for funds!
The Future of Kickstarter
In the past few years, Kickstarter has expanded to a variety of territories. It’s remarkable how much of their core concept has remained the same, despite their competitor, Indiegogo, launching multiple sections to their website like InDemand and Life (see more here). They even introduced “backer insurance.”
Considering that they do not plan to enter equity crowdfunding or ever sell, I think that a good amount of the future growth for Kickstarter can come from making it a household name among celebrity circles. It’s a great medium for well-known filmmakers and other artists to engage with their fans, in the same way they might on Twitter or Instagram.
Finally, more education about what crowdfunding is and the benefits for creators and backers will naturally lead to more growth in the industry, which is my mission with this blog!
What do you think of these stats?
Math was one of my least favorite subjects in school (which is strange, because I liked programming), so if I messed up in my calculations, let me know! I’d love to hear what you think about these numbers and what trends you’ve spotted in the rewards-based crowdfunding arena.
