[ori_b]

> it doesn’t help to remind people that 56% of Kickstarter projects fail to meet their funding goal.

Is it just me, or is that actually an amazingly high percentage? If you'd asked me to guess, I would have expected it to be hovering between 5% to 10%.

[Kuiper]

When you browse all Kickstarter projects rather than simply checking the most popular presentations from each category, it quickly becomes apparent that a lot of the projects have very little effort invested in them and lack the backing of any sort of serious talent. This is especially apparent in the game's category. "Here's some concept art for a game I want to make. I want to make it mechanically similar to games X, Y, and Z. Please give me $80,000" is pretty common, and it's equally common to see projects that don't even make 10% of their fundraising goal. Understandably, Kickstarter doesn't display these projects prominently on the front page; you need to dig several layers deep to find them.

If you've never browsed Kickstarter, your perception of Kickstarter success rates is probably colored even further by the fact that hearing about a Kickstarter outside of Kickstarter (on an aggregate such as reddit, HN, etc) is social proof and that itself is a symptom of success.

For a similar exercise, try checking the HN new queue. Lots of submissions fail to get even a single upvote; you just never see them.

If anything, I'd say that 44% successfully funded seems amazingly high. Much fewer than 44% of Kickstarter projects I've viewed actually deserved to be funded, in my opinion. Then again, this perception is likely skewed by the fact that I've spent a disproportionate amount of time in the games category, which seems to be plagued by "everyone wants to be a game dev without knowing how to code" syndrome.

[masterzora]

I make a regular habit of clicking through a large number of Kickstarter projects and back a fair number and that number doesn't surprise me at all. I suggest you also look through a few sometime. A lot of projects on Kickstarter are, quite frankly bad. They are trying to build something nobody wants or their projections or idea are unrealistic. They provide little to no information about the project. Their reward tiers are unattractive or poorly built. Their creators lack credibility and have nothing to back them up. They are obvious scams. They have ridiculously short or ridiculously long funding periods. They do no promotion outside of Kickstarter. The creators provide no updates and don't communicate with backers.

The projects you see are the ones that overcome all or most of these potential issues and I'd suspect that the numbers for those are much, much better. But I'm honestly surprised that only 56% fail given what I've seen.

[ori_b]

That's exactly what tried to say. I would have guessed that about 90 to 95% would fail. I suppose I wasn't clear. And now it's too late to edit.

[jizzard]

Kickstarter does not seem to approve every project. As discovered here [1], there are currently at least 70,000 unpublished projects. For comparison, between 2010 and 2011 they launched 38,000 projects. [2]

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142405270230437150... [2] http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/2011-the-stats

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I'm really surprised also. I wonder if the ones who hit their funding level are the ones also aggressively marketing their project while the others just "put it out there and wait."

In other words, are the projects getting funded on Kickstarter the ones driven by people who would succeed anyway, this just makes it a bit easier for them?

[InclinedPlane]

The kickstarters you're likely to pay attention to are the popular ones, which have a much higher chance of getting funded.

[pcopley]

I got the impression that the majority of projects were successfully funded; this is likely due in part to the fact that the majority of projects you see on Kickstarter have been successfully funded.

I don't see any problem with the way Kickstart is operated as a business. You see a lot of funded projects, you're more likely to put in the time and energy to a great presentation for your own project. Seeing that most projects fail even the most basic fundraising stage would probably have otherwise discouraged folks from utilizing Kickstarter and ultimately cost Kickstarter revenue.