Kickstarter is an enormous crowdfunding website that supports thousands of people in actualizing their dreams. I was curious about how different categories perform and what insight can I provide to someone who wants to start a project on kickstarter.
I used Kickstarter data since 2009, and created interactive visualizations using the Python Library Plotly. Feel free to move your cursor to the graphs, it will give you more information. You can also find the code below.
I wanted to look at their historic data to answer the following questions:
Questions:
- What percentage of campaigns succeed or fail?
- How many campaigns per year have there been on Kickstarter since 2009?
- How many campaigns in each category have there been on Kickstarter since 2009 per year? and how many were successful?
- How many total backers per category since 2009? (credence to the crowd-sourcing claim)
- What is the average run time per campaign? How quickly would you know if your campaign will succeed or fail?
- How global is the Kickstarter community? How much has each country contributed?
- Which campaign categories are more popular during which months? and which campaign categories raise more money during which months?
What percentage of campaigns succeed or fail?
Findings:
It’s fascinating that more campaigns fail than succeed and by a relatively big margin. Yet, the success chances are not abysmal, making Kickstarter an excellent platform for launching projects.
How many campaigns per year have there been on Kickstarter since 2009?
Findings:
That is a significant number of campaigns. We can see that the second year (2010), Kickstarter witnessed a great increase in the number of campaigns on it’s website. We can also see that they have been steadily growing, with 2016 being the year with the most campaigns. It’s worth nothing that the data goes to the middle of 2017, so the 2017 column is not fully representative.
How many campaigns in each category have there been on Kickstarter since 2009 per year? and how many were successful?
Findings:
These visualizations show us that Film & Video is the most popular category for campaigns, followed by Publishing and Music. The least popular category is Dance, though it is worth noting that the Dance category has the least number of campaigns overall.
It’s also interesting to see the success vs. failure rate per category. In Film & Video as with most categories, the failure rate is higher than the success rate. However, in Music, Comics and Theater categories more campaigns succeed rather than fail!
How many total backers per category since 2009? (credence to the crowd-sourcing claim)
Findings:
Wow, this website truly lives to it’s crowd-sourcing reputation. Millions of people have supported various campaigns, and clearly more people have supported successful campaigns than failed ones. We can also clearly see that the Design, Technology and Games categories are the most popular with the backers. It is incredible that there have been more than 10 million backers in the Games category alone since 2009.
What is the average run time per campaign? How quickly would you know if your campaign will succeed or fail?
Here Is a different Perspective:
Findings:
We can see that the overwhelming majority of campaigns in all categories either succeed or fail within approximately 35 days or 1 month. This information is very valuable to anyone who wants to start a new campaign. This clearly shows that any new campaign must be well thought out and must focus all the energy on the first month, that will make it or break it.
How global is the Kickstarter community? How much has each country contributed?
Findings:
These visualizations show clearly that the United States is where a great majority of the campaigns happen. Americans represent 82% of the backers to Kickstarter campaigns and have contributed almost $3 Billion since 2009.
While Kickstarter is global in a sense, most of the campaigns originate in rich countries. This information can be helpful to anyone who lives in a less rich nation who wants to kickstart a project and wonders where to focus their marketing efforts.
Which campaign categories are more popular during which months? and which campaign categories raise more money during which months?
Findings:
These graphs show very insightful information regarding campaigns per category. We can clearly see that there have been more Film & Video campaigns than any other category and we can see that these campaigns are most popular March through May. We can also see that Design campaigns and Technology campaigns raise the most money especially during June (Design), and March and May (Technology)
Overall, this project was a ton of fun. It was also very educational to learn about the history of these campaign and hopefully provide some clear data driven insights to anyone who wants to start a campaign on kickstarter. Now, armed with this information, you can formulate an excellent strategy to almost guarantee success.
As for what more can be done with this project, I think a classification algorithm can be applied to provide a better understanding and a better model for predicting failure or success of various projects.
You can find the code below or on Github. I recommend viewing it in nbviewer for the full experience.