[...] have talked about Kickstarter – Johanna Draper Carlson being the most prominent, having voiced her opinions about the platform multiple times. While I agree with some of her cautionary words, I also am [...]

[...] months ago, I warned people of the dangers of Kickstarter before moderating my concerns. Since then I’ve donated to my first Kickstarter effort — I’m looking forward to [...]

I’m not surprised to hear that they’ve already reached a point when more projects fail than succeed.

You are crammed on a page with 14 other projects. It used to be less but Kickstarter had over 400 pages crammed with projects and needed to find a way to hide that. So they added more projects per page.

The search is clumsy. I checked the site today and searched around. I think it sucks that failed, expired projects are showing up before running projects!

And I for one will throw my hand up that I noticed that there were “pet projects” getting tons of attention. And it does not help when sites like Kickstarter staff pick sections. Wow, let’s increase the favoritism even more!

Sure there are Kickstarter successes, but there are far more fails. The odds are against you from the start.

Kickstarter doesn’t list your project in the newest projects section until after you have raised funds. Why? Because Kickstarter and Indiegogo are set up so that the funds drive everything. They don’t see you and no one else will unless you are making money. I could be selling dismembered toes and so long as I got people pledging I would see my project going up, up, up. This means my project will be king of the mountain and everyone else can go screw themselves. It is like when you play pinball and the ball gets stuck between the bumpers and everything goes DING! DING! DING!

Remember, it is about money and Kickstarter will place whoever is making the most money at the top. It became a popularity contest, not a valid fund-raising tool. You can’t really call it crowd-funding because the crowd never really got a chance to see most of the projects, there are thousands upon thousands of them.

At least I know now that I am not the only one to feel this way.

This explains why the fads, the shooting stars are kings of the site and always show near the top. I feel bad for people trying to raise money for crayons for Rwandan children because it is doubtful to raise the buzz. And within days that Rwanda project will be many, many pages down with little hope of being seen.

“I think you may be expecting more of Kickstarter than they promise. They just provide the machinery to make donations easy — you are still responsible for getting the word out, as you suggest.”

Actually Amazon provides that machinery, and charges 3% of total funding to do so (in line with Google Checkout and PayPal). What, then, does Kickstarter charge 5% for if not advertising? Granted, “recommended” projects do enjoy Kickstarter advertising by virtue of being indexed by default on the Discover page, but those that aren’t don’t get enough traffic to justify their existence on Kickstarter according to my experience. Searching Google with multiple obvious keywords it looks like Kickstarter actually isn’t advertising itself at all but solely relying upon its users to do so.

I’ve used Google AdWords extensively for the last two years and know a bit about click through and conversion rates. 3.4 hits per day isn’t enough to fund a lemonade stand even with a 20% plus conversion rate, which would be unusually high in any market but especially philanthropy.

Your points about the effectiveness of the project description and rewards as well as the requested funding goal may or may not be valid (no way to tell really since it’s subjective), but they don’t address my main point which is that Kickstarter offers little to no help for projects that aren’t “recommended” due to the design of its web site.

$10,000 is about what I need for a professional digital camera, test server and hundreds of miniatures for the game graphics, so the number isn’t arbitrary. Were I to have a 100% conversion rate and maintained 3.4 unique visits per day for the 90-day duration of the project I would need each visitor to pledge an average of $32.68 to successfully fund the project. Regardless of my project description, video, audio or anything else related to the project page this is unlikely to happen without more daily visitors. If Kickstarter isn’t bringing eyes to your project, then what is it really doing that your own web site wouldn’t?

Johanna said:

“I’m not sure how you’re going to be worse off when this fails, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to succeed, and that’s not Kickstarter’s fault.”

The investment of time (creating and maintaining the Kickstarter project page) and money ($200+ in press releases) constitute being worse off should the funding fail, as mentioned in my previous post.

To use eBay again as an analogue, imagine posting an item for sale and having no one see it because they have to adjust a default filter to show “non staff recommended” items for it to appear in the categories they’re browsing. That’s really my point here, all others aside. I’m just glad I put a hit counter on the page so I wouldn’t be second-guessing myself as to why I wasn’t getting more pledges.

I visited your project page and noted the following issues, that may be negatively affecting you:

1. You’re asking for $10,000, which is an awful lot. People may see that amount and think “that’ll never happen, I won’t bother contributing”.
2. Your project description is too long and made me lose interest before I finished reading it. Concentrate on clear information covering the basics and then provide the details for those who want to read more.
3. Your rewards are not interesting and cost too much. If I’m funding the game, I want to be able to play it. I have to give $175 to get an unrestricted account, and that’s just ludicrous when I can go buy a commercial video game for less than $60.

I’m not sure how you’re going to be worse off when this fails, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to succeed, and that’s not Kickstarter’s fault.

Kickstarter is like eBay in that it provides a system where money can safely exchange hands and that they charge a fee for advertising your product. The problem is, if your project isn’t “staff recommended” no one will likely ever see it. When you click the Discover link it defaults to only showing staff recommended projects. Even clicking a sub topic like Games or Film, you’re still filtered by staff recommended until you manually change it to “ending soon” or something else, which almost no one will do.

As an example, my project has been online for over 30 days and is not staff recommended. I added an html hit counter 10 days ago and the project is averaging 3.4 unique visits per day. Most of these are probably robots/crawlers or the results of my press release a few weeks ago. In other words, Kickstarter isn’t advertising my project at all, which defeats half the purpose.

The bottom line is that unless your project gets picked up by the press or becomes staff recommended, you’re better off just asking your friends and family for money and starting your own web page with a “donate with PayPal” button. So far I’ve wasted over $200 on press releases and countless hours of time creating the Kickstarter project, and when funding inevitably fails will be worse off than when I started.

I’ve emailed their staff about this and after a week have received no response.

[...] reward is so well-chosen for the strip (a logo-bearing flask). I think this will be my first Kickstarter contribution. [...]

Thank you for following up on this subject. I too have learned much from the discussion and will be doing my best to produce good projects. We stake our reputations on what we offer to deliver via Kickstarter and it is up to us to make sure we do so.

Take care,

–Christian

As for your last line, I’ve found that when it comes to review copies, the good works don’t need to send them out (and so don’t distribute as widely) nearly as much as the bad ones do. I’m assuming something similar is going to start happening with Kickstarter “press releases”. Perhaps I’ll wind up being wrong about that, too — we’ll have to wait and see.

Or something.

I also don’t buy the suggestion you will hear about the bad ones because they need the most help.

[...] and e-mails that shared similar sentiments to the ones I posted here, Johanna Draper Carlson has changed her mind about Kickstarter. She still has a few valid points in regard to ideal situations vs. reality but the fact remains: [...]

[...] Creators | Johanna Draper Carlson has rethought her earlier stance on not supporting creators' Kickstarter projects. [Comics Worth Reading] [...]