Last week Kickstarter published “The Year in Kickstarter,” a look back at 2011: the trends, interesting moments, statistics, and their favorite videos. For anyone who loves their crowd-sourced funding model, it’s worth a look.
My favorite page was the Stats page, which gives little tidbits like the total dollars pledged ($99,344,382) and the percentage of projects that succeeded (46%). What’s also interesting is the breakdown of those pledges and the types of projects that were funded. The color-wheel image is unfortunately not a pie chart so you have to hover over every slice to see the details. You’ll find that art-based projects (movies, music, theater, photography, and so on) are still the biggest piece of the pie — which is in keeping with Kickstarter’s origins. But games had the biggest increase in number of backers, up a whopping 730% from 2010, with over 45,000 backers kicking in over $3.6 million. That’s pretty incredible.
Another fun page is the Videos page, where Kickstarter staff share just 12 of their favorite videos of the year. Imagine watching 30,000 Kickstarter videos in one year — that’s what the staff did. So you know for this dozen to make it, they had to do a really great job.
As something of a Kickstarter addict myself, I loved scanning through this year in review. While I’m nowhere near the top ten of the “Most Prolific Backers,” I’m proud of the projects I was able to help fund, and I’m looking forward to another year of supporting fantastic ideas.
