[samineru]

I would agree if there were a way to find these failed cases if you looked hard enough. Other than acquiring the link before the end date of the project there doesn't seem to be a way. This may be a good way to check what happened to project X, but not to answer the question:

"How have other projects in field foobar done, which ones have failed or succeeded, and what does each group have in common?"

[misener]

That's exactly the kind of thing I'd like to be able to do. For instance, I'd love to know which categories have the highest success rates, etc.

[roc]

That sounds like an interesting project. Create a spider that crawls funding sites (more and more each day it seems) and collects statistics and timelines.

It could even search for references to individual projects on the popular search engines, to gather data on what sources for attention have what kinds of impact on which kinds of projects, etc.

[egypturnash]

There's one doing that, but only for Kickstarter - check out http://www.kicktraq.com.