Leon Puplett

2012 was a huge year for Kickstarter. The New York based company this week posted their year in review, boasting some pretty impressive figures.

2.2 million people from 177 different countries pledged over $319million across 18,109 projects. This worked out at $606.76 per minute. On average this would work out at $17,615.55 per project. However, 17 projects raised over $1million! 

Across the site there were improvements for the now 3 and a half year old company. The total money collected (for successful projects) was up 238% on 2011 whilst only having 34% more backers. Only 1 in 43 Unique Users actually pledged money. 

If you’re looking to get funded on Kickstarter, Music is a good bet with the highest amount of successful projects, with 5,067. Suprisingly Dance is statistically the best performing (excuse the pun) with 70% of all projects being successful*. Fashion is the least successful category with only 27% of projects getting their funding.  

Game projects brought in over $83million – over 25% of ALL money pledged in 2012! Each successful game project raised $96,000 on average, with each backer pledging $148. To put this in context, the entire Game category raised a meagre $50,000 in 2009.

Film was also a big category in 2012. 10% of 2012’s Sundance films were Kickstarter funded and Incident in New Baghdad became the second Oscar nominated Kickstarter project.

There is a negative side to Kickstarter. For every successful project there are failures (43% to be exact). 

  Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing in more ways than one. While 11% of projects finished having never received a single pledge, 81% of projects that raised more than 20% of their goal were successfully funded.

So from this the magic number for any project is 20%. If a project gets to 20%, it’s much more likely make it to 100%. Great news!

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As for me, I funded my first project this year. It’s a pay-what-you-want collection of digital comics written and produced by Ryan Estrada of South Korea. He was looking to raise $2500 and with 21 days to go (at the time of writing) has raised just under $15000. What’s been very interesting is that the larger amount that has been pledged, Ryan has had to keep up creating targets, and reasons for new backers to help him achieve them. Ryan has also been great with regular updates which come across with genuine surprise at the early success.

Creators from the UK have been able to start projects on Kickstarter since October 2012. In it’s first month alone just over £2million was pledged across 407 projects. Just 30 of these projects were successfully funded. Interestingly enough, only 39% of the backers for UK projects were UK based. 23% were from other EU countries and 23% from the US (the assumed biggest user base). 

I’m looking forward to finding a new project to fund each month and will make sure to share them once they’re received. Get in touch if you find any worth looking into.

* not 2012 figures