{"id":35,"date":"2013-07-10T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-10T14:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/?p=35"},"modified":"2013-07-10T14:05:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-10T14:05:00","slug":"on-kickstarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"On Kickstarter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi everyone – today we’re going to talk about Kickstarter.  We’re going to talk about Kickstarter because I’m currently Kickstarting a Kickstarter project related to the blog.  Kickstarter. <\/p>\n

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Anyway, for those of you who like to just get to the point right away, here’s a link to the project.<\/div>\n
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full link: http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/559929228\/quantifying-star-wars-the-e-book<\/a><\/div>\n
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or short form for easy linking: http:\/\/kck.st\/1514HKO<\/a><\/div>\n
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Take a moment to go check it out, and if you’d liked some of the stuff on here do consider tossing a few bucks at it.  If you’ve never used Kickstarter (and don’t have an account) take note that it’s actually quite easy to get started with.  Check out my project, check out some other projects – there’s always something good on there.  <\/div>\n
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Also, pass along the word to anyone who will listen.  I’ve set the initial funding bar low, but have some fairly crazy stretch goals in there.  The more people who fund the project, the more stuff everyone gets out of it.  I doubt I’ll hit them, but who knows.<\/div>\n
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So, go check it out, and spread the word!<\/div>\n
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If you want to talk a bit more about Kickstarter, though, that’s what the rest of today’s post is about.<\/div>\n
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Kickstarter was set up a few years ago (2009) as a means of crowd-funding projects (not to be confused with cloud-funding projects).  People put up projects, and other people can support those projects to help get them off the ground.  If the project is funded the person who created the project gets the money pledged, and if the project is not funded no one is charged anything.  <\/div>\n
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Kickstarter keeps a page on their website about stats, and they seem to update it daily.  It’s actually a pretty cool resource, and you can find it here:<\/div>\n
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http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/help\/stats<\/a><\/div>\n
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You can see that Kickstarter recently passed the 100,000 projects launched mark, and they also just passed the point where they have successfully raised 600 million dollars.  Yes,<\/div>\n
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$600,000,000.00<\/div>\n
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So, they’re doing alright.<\/div>\n
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There are also some cool numbers about successful and unsuccessful projects.  There have been around 45,000 successful projects and around 57,000 unsuccessful projects.  <\/div>\n
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The successful projects that have raised a ton of money ( http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/discover\/most-funded<\/a> ) are kind of few and far between.  The majority of projects are just small things that raise less than $10,000 – at the moment right around 77% of successful projects raised less than 10K.  <\/div>\n
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The unsuccessful projects, though, well, a lot of them just seem to sit and languish without anyone ever pledging anything.  Nearly 1 in 5 of unsuccessful projects never get a single pledge.  <\/div>\n
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That could mean that those were just poorly constructed projects, etc, or that there’s some sort of momentum that builds as a project gets going.  No one wants to be the first person to back a project, right?  If no one else is doing it, it must not be good?  It would be pretty interesting to actually find a way to measure some of that, but for now all we can really do is speculate. <\/p>\n

I’ve never been a first pledge on a project, so I’m not really sure what it feels like.  Whoever pledges first on this one, what was your thinking?  Do you wish there were comments so you could yell FIRST?<\/p><\/div>\n

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Kickstarter does point out that once a project gets past 20% funding it is more likely to succeed than to fail.  There are a lot of projects (over 46,000 as of today) that fail while failing to reach that 20% threshold.   <\/div>\n
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So, that’s what I’m hoping for today.  20% of this project is only $50, so we’re talking baby steps.  One person could do that on their own, though I’m not trying to say that one person alone needs to.  If we can get to 20% today then we can just let momentum carry things for a while.  <\/div>\n
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Though, it would also just be great to fully fund it, too.  That would make things nice and easy.  <\/div>\n
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So why are you still here?  Go check out the project!<\/div>\n
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full link: http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/559929228\/quantifying-star-wars-the-e-book<\/a><\/div>\n
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or short form: http:\/\/kck.st\/1514HKO<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi everyone – today we’re going to talk about Kickstarter.  We’re going to talk about Kickstarter because I’m currently Kickstarting a Kickstarter project related to the blog.  Kickstarter. Anyway, for those of you who like to just get to the point right away, here’s a link to the project. full link: http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/559929228\/quantifying-star-wars-the-e-book or short form for … Continue reading On Kickstarter<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulgcurran.com\/skepticalstats\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}