Whenever there’s something new, people create analogies. He began with one of the key issues Kickstarter faces, which is the perception that it’s a shop where you buy stuff rather, than a patronage site where you have the opportunity to take a risk on a project: It’s an important question and one worth getting answers for, so I spoke to Kickstarter’s Justin Kazmark. But when it does, what happens? In September, NPR’s All Things Considered had an episode asking, When a Kickstarter campaign fails, does anyone get their money back?. Not so much a false promise, then, as a promise likely to suffer delays and only occasionally going south. Even though Kickstarter has no enforcement mechanism to prevent con artists from using the system to raise funds for fake projects, it is clear that with a direct failure rate well below 5%, founders take their obligations seriously. Further, the projects that were not responding totaled just $21,324 in pledges, compared to nearly $4.5 million for the remaining projects. The direct failure rate, therefore was 14 out of 381 products, or. As of the time of the analysis, 3 projects had issued refunds, and 11 had apparently stopped responding to backers. A total of 316 projects promised to deliver products and an addition 65 offered giveaways (such as “making-of” documentaries, project t-shirts, or other results that were not finished products). Out of the 471 projects, 381 had clearly identifiable outcomes. To analyze the success of crowdfunding efforts, I used the 471 successful Kickstarter projects in the categories of Design and Technology that had promised delivery dates for rewards to funders before July, 2012. Mollick goes on to look at fulfilment in more detail:
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Delays are predicted by the size of the project, with overfunded projects being particularly vulnerable to delay. Ounders of projects seem to make good faith efforts to fulfill their obligations to funders, though many projects are delayed. The actual details are that only 25 percent of the Design and Technology projects examined delivered on time, but after “eight months of delay, 75 percent of finished products will have been delivered”. The paper she refers to, by Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with assistance from AppsBlogger’s Jeanne Pi, was an interesting piece of work, and I covered Pi’s infographic based on the analysis back in July. The lead may be buried, but it’s there:Īs many as 75 percent of Kickstarter projects don’t deliver on time, according to a recent University of Pennsylvania study, and some never deliver at all. It would be a sad world indeed if people weren’t up for having a bit of fun with a few zombie ostrich statues, and who is Malone to tell people how they can spend their money? Want to fund a daft project? Well, it’s your money, spend it on what you like.īut then, and finally, it seems like we’re getting to the meat of the piece.
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Sometimes crowds aren’t wise crowds are wiseasses.
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The statue is set to go up in blighted Detroit, whose residents can probably think of more urgent uses for $70,000. Then there’s the case of the RoboCop statue: via Kickstarter, $67,436 was raised to erect a giant metal ode to the 1980s sci-fi film.
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Or take the “ostrich pillow,” a sort of Slanket for the head, which provides “a micro environment in which to take a comfortable power nap in the office.” The ostrich pillow brought in more than double its hoped-for funding. Malone then takes a poke at some of the more ridiculous projects funded by Kickstarter:Ī “zombie-based” school curriculum hauled in more than $11,000. But sadly, the more closely I read Malone’s piece, the thinner and more threadbare it appears. As much as I’m a fan of Kickstarter - I’ve used it twice, once successfully - I’m always interested to hear about the problems people face using it, because it’s only from failure that we truly learn. Titled The False Promise of Kickstarter, it had the snide subtitle, Fund me, I’m useless. I was interested to see an article from Noreen Malone in The New Review slide into my inbox a few days ago. And for others it has become an exemplar of irresponsibility and broken dreams. Then, with the advent of the first $100,000 project, and then the first $1,000,000 project, it became for some a get rich quick scheme, for many a storefront for the new and innovative. First it was the plucky little start-up that helped plucky little people fund plucky little projects. As Kickstarter has developed over the last three years it’s been interesting to watch the dynamics a2round it change.