Arts Production in an Era of Crowdfunding: Introduction to Data from the Kickstarter Platform

hello and welcome everyone uh to icpsr's love data week my name is anna of chinekova i'm the data project manager for uh national archive of data on arts and culture uh funded by the national endowment for the arts also here today with me is lynette holter lynette is nadex director we are both delighted to have you join us today for this presentation um arts production on uh in the era of crowdfunding introduction to data from the kickstarter platform i now would like to give a warm welcome to o

ur presenters john leland and doug moonen john is the vice president of insights and head of the environmental impact group at kickstarter where he oversees research to inform assess and drive product and marketing strategy across the company john also manages kickstarter's data and analytics infrastructure doug nunes noonan is the paul h o'neill professor at the o'neill school at iupui doug's research focuses on a variety of policy and economics issues related to the cultural affairs urban envi

ronments neighborhood dynamics and quality of life he is currently the co-editor-in-chief of the journal of cultural economics co-founder and faculty director of the center for cultural affairs at the indiana university and in partnership with the national endowment for the arts co-director of the arts entrepreneurship and innovation lab there is a high level uh agenda for today's webinar we'll start with john telling us about kickstarter and the kickstarter data and then doug will discuss appli

cations of uh kickstarter data and empirical research and promising questions and avenues for new research that one could pursue using these types of data we'll end with answering your questions but like i mentioned before please feel free to submit those using q a box on the bottom of your zoom window anytime during today's presentation and without further ado john the four is yours thank you let me share my screen here okay that should work um okay thank you so much for joining us today i'm ju

st going to talk to you about like what kickstarter is and a bit about the data that we're sharing so kickstarter uh as you probably know if you're here is a crowdfunding platform for creative projects specifically um that means that creators and on the platform creators launch a what we call a project so this is sort of important terms here uh that that sort of shape our data uh creators launch a project to raise money from what we call backers so the backers are putting money into these campai

gns um or really what we call projects you can see in purple here on a project page or campaign page you have a number of backers and you have a single creator which is what's boxed here in red every project on the platform has a funding goal uh which you can see in boxed in red here that must be met in a campaign window uh which you can see boxed in purple here that window will be 1 to 60 days 60 days is the limit although if you go back to the beginning of kickstarter there was at the beginnin

g it was 90 days actually we cut that down at some point very early on 2012 or 2013 i think um but you have to hit that goal in order to receive the funding so kickstarter unlike actually all other crowdfunding platforms uh really it has this all or nothing model where you set that goal you have your timeline usually it's 30 days it's the most popular choice you in your 30 days if you raise from backers enough money to hit that goal or go beyond it then at the end of the campaign everyone gets c

harged the transaction happens the creator receives their funds if they are unable to hit that target during the campaign window then nothing happens no backers get charged no money changes hands nothing happens at all so it creates this mechanism of sort of success failure as a binary we do that to protect both creators and backers because the relationship that's being set up between creators and backers is for reward and every project um if we go back to this every project you know backers are

pledging to receive something it's a promise to receive something usually from the camp from the project and if the creator is saying i need fifteen thousand dollars to execute on this project and they only raise five thousand dollars from a bunch of people i've promised to execute on this project for they don't have the money to do it but i do have money from all these people so we want to protect people from making promises they can't deliver on to be a creative project on kickstarter project

s must create something to share with others that's sort of the basic requirement but it also must fit within one of our 15 categories uh you can see the category listed here art comics uh dance design fashion film music games journalism technology theater so these these range from traditional arts to stuff that might be more in the in design consumer space or board games is a massive part of our ecosystem right now um every campaign may also doesn't have to but may also select one of our 161 su

bcategories uh and these are kind of all over the place every every top level category has its own set of subcategories that creators can choose from for their project and they range from you know bacon to knitting to poetry it's all over the place but creators don't have to choose a subcategory um as i said backers usually pledge to a project in exchange for a reward although they can choose not to you can pledge for no reward that's an option of just giving your money to creators different cat

egories of different uh rates of people doing that uh which probably line up as you would expect the more kind of commercial or consumer the relationship is so if you're backing for a board game you probably want that board game um but if you're pledging to a mural project or a dance performance you may not care as much about receiving a reward for that you just want to support that that creator that artist since 2009 uh we've had 425 000 creators have launched 500 000 projects on the platform a

nd received support from 20 million backers um those 20 million backers have pledged over 6 billion dollars which has successfully funded 200 over 200 000 projects um so not quite half of the of all the projects that i've launched um and those projects have successfully raised about a little more than 5.8 billion dollars right so most of the money that's pledged on the platform you can tell goes into successfully funded campaigns most of the projects that fail to fund uh raise between zero and 2

0 percent of their goal they're kind of trees in a forest that fall without making too much of a noise um the largest project on our platform raised over 20 million dollars that was the pebble second pebble campaign which was a smart watch kind of precursor to the apple watch um i raised it from 78 000 backers um but the median successfully funded project is quite small so it raises just five thousand dollars from 77 backers so most all the volumes sort of in these small small projects which aga

in run the gamut in terms of breakdown amongst the launch projects film games music and publishing have the most launch projects on the platform though those the balance between these categories has definitely shifted significantly over time and most projects have been launched from the us although there are a number of other countries that folks launch from and we aren't available in every country i can you know people have questions about that i can answer those questions uh we are sharing rig

ht now a couple data sets that are public uh the project data set has basically all of our projects funded and unfunded between 20 2009 and 2020 the features there are project title project category and subcategory their location including just the city and state and country the funding goal in original and u.s amounts uh the pledged amount in dollars and the number of backers on that project then we also have a backer location data set that includes the total amount pledged for each geographic

location by country and state there is an additional restricted data set uh that is being made available that has more specific information on sort of creators and backers um before you know i think academics tend to look at this data set and they just look at all the numbers uh so i want to give you some flavor before handing it over to some more number analysis the kickstarter projects are wild it is a crazy ocean of creativity they are beautiful so here's a few meow wolf art complex which i r

eally want to go to is just like a psychedelic indie warehouse disneyland space outside of santa fe which it's just like a massive complex that probably feels like you're on lsd if you go in there uh from everything i've seen i would really like to go you've got things like minecofon which which is a beautiful project it's it actually was acquired by moma and is a kind of roving uh mine detector diff like detonator that just roams deserts and acts like a tumbleweed but something off lines um and

then that dragon cancer which is really one of the most beautiful but heartbreaking campaigns in my tenure and it also speaks to what kickstarter is so that dragon cancer is a video game developed by an independent designer who lost his five-year-old son to cancer and the video game is about that experience of losing his son to cancer that is the sort of thing that no video game company is ever going to fund right but it is so important that that kind of work gets made because it doesn't fit in

side traditional concepts of what makes money what should get made and this is precisely why we exist is that we think people should be able to have ideas like this that don't have avenues and traditional forms of funding and putting creative work out into the world and ask the world to help make them make it real uh these projects are also strange there's a lot of weirdness in here as well if you want to if you want to go it's the internet uh you've got like a love turtle hat guy up there top l

eft just a a sweet old man making turtle hats very enthusiastic about it he raised let me see here here's thousand dollars for his turtlenecks it's just like delightful the you got butts uh you're gonna see a spectrum of not safe for work content this was a kind of uh cheeky um uh version of that yeah um which is actually a live campaign i just stumbled across it um and then potato salad which actually if you're working with our data you need to just keep in mind because potato salad ruined our

data potato salad was a campaign launched just sort of i think basically a stoned thought from a kid in cincinnati there's a 10 goal to just make a potato salad and he raised 55 000 yeah so sometimes you know we exist on the internet and sometimes the internet takes you for a ride and the internet took us for a ride where people thought it'd be really funny to pour money into this potato salad project that someone launched just for no reason uh zach was great about it he was like on the today sh

ow it got tons of press and coverage which is how something you know went viral and he was great about he launched a music festival in cincinnati where they were just serving giant vats of potato salad and feeding the homeless and it was great but it did lead to a lot of exposure for the site a lot of misunderstanding what kickstarter is a feeling like maybe this is just a magical money fairy uh that if you put up a terrible idea for a potato salad or you know barbecue that people will hand you

55 000 which obviously isn't what happened but it led to a spike in launched projects but not really in successful projects it was basically just like we got flooded with garbage um so you can you can see that in uh the data starting in july 2014 had a long tail effect and then you know you see this all over the place but kickstarter projects just have like a much bigger impact than what you can see in the data set and that can you know certainly we've had some major companies start on the platf

orm peloton started on the platform all birds oculus rift all you know there's a bunch of billion dollar plus companies that got started on kickstarter we don't get a cut of this otherwise i would be calling you from a much fancier place than this um but you also have cultural things that just like have the seed get started here so fleabag if you're familiar with the i want to say netflix series i'm not sure if that's right um but it's like a critically acclaimed you know very popular television

show got started with a very small campaign you know four thousand pounds from 54 backers so that flea bag could go to the fringe festival um which is where it got started so you just have like these long tail long-term cultural impacts from these things that have their genesis okay star there's plenty of films albums grammy-nominated oscar-winning stuff that has just emerged out of pretty small modest campaigns on kickstarter that you would you don't know it when you when it's coming through t

he platform because you get these things so early in their in their life cycles but then go on to have these lives in the real world so have fun it's explore the weirdness of all of it um you'll see a bunch of weird stuff animal meditations is one of my projects so check that one out because that's the sort of you can also launch projects on kickstart you know animal meditations is a really small weird project that would not exist other you know if it wasn't for 265 people that most of whom i di

dn't know being like yeah i want you to record uh meditations or what it would be like to be a sloth eating a leaf and that's that's the beauty of kickstarter so i'll leave it there great thank you don that was great awesome uh now it's dog's turn yeah thank you and i i love the setup this is gonna uh put a lot of color and and and flavor in in what i want to share here so i want to talk a bit about the data and some of the applications which you can do with this um and and i'm going to whip thr

ough a bunch of slides later you get the recording you hit you can hit pause and see what i was really talking about you can put some questions in the q a i'm going to go through a lot pretty quickly we've already done the introductions part so i can skip fast sort of who i am but i need to start them with a big thanks uh this is what this to me is all about is my chance to say thank you to john leland and the kickstarter for actually making the data available this is a beautiful day this is a b

eautiful thing for me as someone who's been using kickstarter data for the better part of a decade now i i cherish the day that now that kickstarter is is making this data more broadly available and actually making it better so this is a wonderful repository and also thanks to icpsr and to the national endowment for the arts uh for helping to make this possible also for helping to let me uh and supporting my research and and let me dig into this kind of uh world because it is wild and and and cr

eative and wacky but i also firmly believe it's not all that weird i think maybe it's just reflecting how weird we really are as a people in a society and so i i i think we don't have enough windows into that part of the world and kickstarter and their data provide us a really interesting window into it so thank you to everyone for making this all possible what i want to talk about now uh is to talk a little bit about the data as i see it that's coming out uh and or that is already out um there'

s both there's the public use stuff that's out now i understand and then the restricted use will be uh imminent so i'll talk a little bit about that and then i want to get some examples of quantitative empirical research using this kind of data and then raise some questions at the end but then hopefully i'll be able to answer a couple of questions that might come up uh from the attendees so one of these data breaks down as far as i can tell into two different big data data sets there's the kicks

tarter project data set and the backer location data the kickstarter project part as john already mentioned there's the public use part and then the restricted use that adds in the text blurb sort of the subtitle for the project uh some name and url name fields that aren't in the public use one and then there's this backer location data set uh as well as a separate and novel piece of data out there so we're looking at half a million data points just in the projects uh data set which is really ex

citing to me i think he listed that there were 150 something subcategories and as i'll mention later uh when you combine subcategories with categories there's a lot of different variation in these groups everywhere things from taxidermy and chiptune all the way out to board games and product design and other bigger categories um we're going to get information in here on the project's location the dates of the project for its start date and its end date the goal the dollar goal it had and its ple

dged amounts that is actually able to accumulate and then the number of backers so really core essential data when it comes to analyzing what's going on with kickstarter it takes a lot of the flavor out without the text fields but not entirely there's still actually a little bit of flavor in here that's interesting you look at that backer data there's 11 million data points in that thing it's got state and country level information and dollars pledged for by by backers around the world so they h

ave a back of the location uh data is really interesting um and then i have this little warts and all bit because from my experience using uh other versions of kickstarter data but it's largely been scraped off the web uh most of this data entry com or much of the at least text-based data entry is entered by the users by the creators of the um of the campaigns or the projects and you're gonna find some interesting spelling in there and some strange characters things that don't fit on the keyboar

d and the databases might not actually like you're gonna find some creativity in the entries there not just in the creative content they're creating but there's a surprisingly large number of ways to spell milwaukee for instance when you get into the location uh fields and so there's you're going to find some of these data at least it's in most of the other kickstarter data you find some interesting locations for instance that aren't for instance specific cities they may be neighborhoods or regi

ons and i think some of this sort of creative entry is actually a bit telling um so we could we could actually look at that data to see what people are putting in there and actually learn something from it but that's a answer for another question we'll get into later when you think about the prior research that's been using uh crowdfunding data there's thousands of papers published on crowdfunding as a phenomenon and i'd suspect many of them if not most are actually using kickstarter as an examp

le for kickstarter data it is not just the dominant crowdfunding platform in the world it's also the dominant crowdfunding platform among data researchers the maybe the most dominant theme in that research using kickstarter data is about the determinants of campaign success so most of these researchers out there seem to be really interested in the secret to your success and how do you launch a successful campaign make sure you've got lots of videos in there and launch it on a tuesday and these k

inds of tips that people have discerned from combing through the data um and i'd like to think that many of that those studies could be redone because things have changed uh kickstarter has been around a long enough time that um it's evolving but that's what a lot of this research is and maybe secondarily there are uh attached and sometimes separate themes about networks particularly social networks or professional networks or networks of backers and networks of creators and thinking about the r

ole of social capital and other kinds of people in fostering successful campaigns but also how these campaigns can actually in reverse foster more social capital or more professional development stronger networks so there's a big network interest and there's also as i'm part of an interest in the geography of crowdfunding and where all this is taking place and so there's big themes in a lot of this old research there's other themes like how kickstarter gets used for marketing and pro social sort

s of content that are out there again as john mentioned this these are often really well designed for things that don't fit into the regular marketplace that don't have simple sort of retail commercial applications there's lots of interest in sort of biases or discrimination and questions about whether or not um you see more of it or even less of it on on the kickstarter platforms really important questions that can be answered and some really interesting research and insights about how for inst

ance women may be doing a lot better on crowdfunding platforms than they would in other conventional venture capital type settings and then there's always an interest and probably not enough research to talk to the external effects of of crowdfunding what happens after the campaigns what happens after the project window closes but also what happened prior to it that brought them there and what are the spillovers and how does all this happen like i think there's a lot of room there to grow and i'

m excited to see where it grows next so what can we do with this data well looking at the data that's out that's going to be out there is up there a lot of the crowdfunding literature out there uses two elements that aren't in the ictsr data first there's a lot more descriptive content about the campaigns and about the creators that i don't think is going to actually be on the nadax site uh and or on the ictsr site and that's just means we have more work to do as the researchers a lot of what re

ally good research is doing that uses the kickstarter data is connecting it to external data whether it's post campaign results or other contextual factors at play and so that's work we need to do as researchers we take this great data source and connect it to these external things and say even more and so expect to be doing that when you dig into this data and the restricted use files when you get to those are going to really help you be able to make those connections i suspect but i also want

to underline this backer location data there in this thousands of papers studying crowdfunding and particularly using kickstarter data there's extraordinarily limited information about backers we don't have a lot of studies where backers are or who the backers are or anything like this it is clearly the biggest gap in any of the research on it and now kickstarter is making available uh specialized dataset about backers and where they are and this is this is fantastic it's a great step and i'm ex

cited to see what will come from people being able to make use of this so even with just the basic stuff that's going to be in the main projects data file we can do a lot knowing subcategories and dates and locations and so on lets us do a lot and i'm going to show you some examples of things that make use of essentially just that data and then sometimes connecting it to some outside but one of the first questions we asked and this is going to be an expansion on the pie graphs that that john sho

wed about is going to be how kickstarter uh treats these different categories in a sense like how do the different categories fare equally well in in the kickstarter ecosystem and i get a lot of questions and interest from funders for instance who want to know if you know opera and dance are are not going to be favored in this new world of online crowdfunding whereas film and video might excel they worry about sort of tilting the playing field so here's a little graphic i cooked up and this is n

ot current by any means up to date date it's a couple years old but we've got blue bubbles representing the 15 main categories and they're proportionate to the number of projects in each of those categories so not a lot of journalism projects but plenty of film and video projects now horizontal axis left to right here is the average success rate in each of those bubbles in each of those categories you can see dance and theater tend to have relatively high success rates whereas crafts and journal

ism not so much and then vertical access is dollars raised and on the average in each of those projects you can see tech games and design stand out as their average ends up being over twenty thousand dollars for project a lot more than the rest of the mass down here and you can see the really large film and video and music and publishing bubbles account for a lot of the projects and they're fairly well sort of evenly spread or in the middle of the road for in terms of success anyway you can get

this data and pull up your own cool graphics and visualizations like this and get to know well how do these different categories bear out what are they like relative to each other in terms of success and size and and so on if we unpack just the arts category now we can look at the subcategories within arts and this is the same kind of graphic but now only looking at subcategories within the arts or among arts program uh projects so you can see uh ceramics tend to be really expensive projects uh

public art a little cheaper success rates for public art projects are a lot higher on average than for textiles and digital art and so you can see there's a lot of interesting variation within different categories one of my favorite ones is to look within music partly because it tells you a bit about the oddity of the internet and kickstarter we have a big outlier out here which is screwing up the scale of of this graph the chiptune category which has high average value and high success rates uh

go out and start your chiptune uh campaign now uh but they're not a lot of these right uh there haven't been a while and so take that one out and then you can see across the different genres of music things like jazz and classical and indie rock tend to have relatively high success rates and hip hop and r b are way at the bottom and i think this is the kind of things that a lot of people should be really interested in what goes on in the distribution of activities who's on kickstarter what gets

supported what doesn't and so on so i think there's some really interesting things that we can get by just looking at the basic data i also want to ask questions about geography that's one of my main interests i don't know where all this stuff is happening where are these projects going on so uh i did a paperwork presence a couple years ago and our first interest was compare crowdfunding in a kickstarter world of venture capital which was incredibly highly spatially concentrated geographically

located in just a handful of cities and well we know it's going to be better than that it's going to be more distributed than that but is it really going to flatten the world and you know crowds by their nature aren't really flat they're highly concentrated uh it's their definition so even though we're virtual crowds does that mean we're going to ignore where people and economic activity really are as crowdfunding just to map onto that and so on so we really wanted to see if kickstarter amplifyi

ng where pro crowds although we already are or dispersing it and to do that a couple years ago we we got together a bunch of the data we mapped it into a bunch of different cities and we sort of aggregated up what kind of activities happening in each city and what kind of categories what's going on and then we mapped it and lo and behold there's a map of bubbles which represents dollars raised by all the different cities around the us and canada and it looks like it's a lot more just evenly dist

ributed than venture capital um it's not just all in boston and the bay area but uh on the other hand this map kind of just looks like a map of the population of the u.s it's relatively empty in the inner mountain west because the us is relatively empty in the intermountain west uh this maps on to largely what onto economic activity across the country you can see the same thing if you look at where projects are that have lots of backers not just necessarily lots of dollars and the story looks ro

ughly the same so one of the first things we found when we start digging into this is the number of projects not the number of backers or dollars the number of projects is much more diffused and spread out around the country but the number of dollars and successes tend to be much more highly concentrated in the big cities so my uh quip for that was ideas are everywhere but good ideas uh turn out they're in the bigger cities uh success isn't everywhere but we were also interested well maybe there

are certain different types of projects we cluster differently are the digital media ones video and music and things do they tend to be more dispersed because you can do that stuff from anywhere it's all virtual whereas a restaurant pro project or a park or a mural those place-based ones maybe those are going to be more spatially uh concentrated and what we ended up finding was exactly the opposite of that on on the whole across all the kickstarter world it maps onto where economic activity is

income population and so on and there's no real additional spatial clustering on kickstarter but if you narrow the analysis to look at just digital media projects we find it maps on to economic economic activity but it amplifies and concentrates it more than what you would see it beyond the normal concentration of economic activity whereas for the more locally based projects we actually see it diffusing more than what we would expect we expect to see from just the natural concentration of econom

ic activity and our story for this is largely that that digital media people who can be anywhere the footloose entrepreneurs because they could be anywhere it doesn't mean that they are everywhere means that they move to the bigger markets in the bigger cities because they can whereas the local projects that are harder to relocate are differentially advantaged in the kickstarter world in the world of online crowdfunding smaller markets and medium-sized markets have a disproportionately bigger ad

vantage from being able to raise funds through a crowdfunding platform than those already in the larger markets and so we see a diffusion to the medium and small size markets benefiting from this kind of activity another project i did was with elizabeth lozaro we were looking more internationally so you can now you can map this onto the whole planet you don't have to limit yourself just to north america and you can see where is kickstarter activity around the world and then we try to do a quick

little model of what explains where it is and you know things like income and speaking english that matters but one of the biggest things we found was that it's actually the smaller domestic markets the smaller populations within a country were sort of disproportionately represented in kickstarter's data suggesting that again the smaller markets are benefiting more from a platform that can let them go global and reach uh things outside their market that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to

do as effectively all right that's a pretty static picture i'm kind of curious about the dynamic where all where's all this geography moving how's it changing over time so did a couple bits of analysis on this and the first one we wanted to look at a metro area perspective strain and versus a brain gain kind of question which urban areas are gaining or losing these kickstarter entrepreneurs these creators so we looked at about a little over 6000 creators who had multiple projects on kickstarter

and they relocated in between project number one and project number two where did they go which cities gained them which cities were losing them and we kind of were curious if it was just random and arbitrary because people don't think kickstarter is all that important in their life they're moving for other reasons like the weather or jobs or maybe they're actually moving in much more system actually related to kickstarter so we come with another cool map of metro areas that are gaining and losi

ng and you can see hot spots in red and cold spots in blue and red red gaining people and blue losing on nets and it's literally all over the map there you look at a list of the cities here on the right hand column the city metro areas that gained the most people people on net things like san francisco nashville seattle maybe the ones you might have expected but then the net losers on the left column austin and boston and san diego maybe not the ones you would have expected to see in both cases

so there's a volatility and it raised the question of is this just random what's going on and the bottom line of the analysis is the migrating patterns that absolutely weren't random anything people were flocking to birds of a feather they were moving to metro areas that had other kickstarter crowdfunders already there working in their same category they weren't just going to cities that had lots of kickstarter activity they were specifically going to cities that had kickstarter activity in thei

r category the same category as their first project they weren't actually chasing relevant jobs in the same sectors there's a little bit of difference in how music creators and film creators and other genres were moving uh but it was actually the case that it was it's kickstarter itself is its own phenomenon that was explaining and attracting and uh describing where the patterns of migration but we also wanted to look at this from the perspective not of the metro area but of the of the creator t

hemselves so and that's one of the beauties of the kickstarter data set is that it gives you access to individual creators and individual creative ventures and there's very few large end projects at a micro level of entrepreneurship so this is a great opportunity for us to ask the question what's guiding those relocation decisions so we started with the 25 000 creators who had multiple projects and asked them after project one and wait and ask them we're gonna ask the data after project number o

ne do they stay or do they go do they relocate or do they have project number two in the same city and then if they did relocate again those six thousand or so where they relocate to the first question is the stay or go question the second one is conditional ongoing where are you going to go to and let's say you're starting in san francisco here you've got thousands of choices of possible destinations what explains why you think destination 73 as opposed to the other tens of thousands well we na

rrowed it down to about 942 different metro areas and micropolitan areas and rural areas by state and try to explain why they picked what they picked and the first question of do you stay or do you go turns out if you were successful in your first project you tended to stay if you had more backers on your first project a big friends and family network you tended to stay if you raised more money you could afford the plane ticket you go right i also found it's being around similar projects project

s in the same category as yours there's a gravitational pull you had to get escape velocity out you were more likely to stay if you were in a community of other people doing the same kind of kickstarter activity as you uh and if they were more successful at it regardless of your success you were more likely to stay and we found that if you were successful on your first project you were even more sensitive to these sort of market indicators and signals about others uh success and activity on kick

starter now for where do you go well the first thing we wanted to look at was are you attracted just to cities that have lots of kickstarter activity the bay area new york or something and it turns out overall kickstarter activity didn't do much to explain where people chose as their destination but instead kickstarter activity in categories of their own based on their own first project was what described where they ended up going they went to cities that had more people doing what they were doi

ng they had more successes higher success rates of those people doing what they're doing and had more backers for those areas they were drawn to market size to big bigger cities um and in general they moved closer nearby as everyone does we tend not to move very far away when we do move there's some differences by a different category but there's some interesting results i think overall nonetheless okay post campaign results you can use this data to look what happens after uh after campaigns and

this was one of my favorite studies because it took on one of my favorite categories on kickstarter that tabletop games uh area the game section in kickstarter is a rich community so we looked at this partly because it's not just a rich community there's also rich sets of external data we could link it to a paper i did with vincenzo there we looked at this games category and at least when i pulled up the date of the um if you look at the average failed project on kickstarter it raises less than

two percent of its goal kind of has these trees falling in the woods and no one's there to notice there's lots of them i used to joke that to me the median project on kickstarter is someone knitting sweaters for cats and it's it's really creative and quirky and probably not all that um supported but people have a chance to try out their ideas and see what what sticks the tabletop games part of kickstarter seems to function quite a bit differently it's a very well evolved and developed marketpla

ce and you've probably played some of these games or seen them on on store shelves and there's a lot of market r d that's essentially happening on kickstarter where people are putting their great ideas out there they're getting backed and then eventually it shows up on shelves at target uh it's a really interesting and rich rich world and we were very interested in this sort of top questions about what happens when you give creative control over to your backers to your audience to the crowd in p

art because a lot of these reward levels in kickstarter projects allow for if you back it at a high enough level you get a chance to influence the design of the product and have a a bit of probably very minor control over the game it's sort of like if i was marketing a version of monopoly and you wanted to give me a thousand dollars as a backer i will name park place after you it will be dug a place if that's what you want if you give me enough money i'll change the game board for you so this id

ea of co-design came in here and we were interested in that but also there's a community here where creators have to work with their backers and answer questions and and deal with complaints and interact with them and some of these things are much more active backers than others some backers are much more passive and they put their money and they wait for the thing to show up so we had we were measuring how much of the commute the backers for a project were active and then how much based on the

design of the campaign backers had co-designed control and we wanted to look at successes in the sense not just of making your goal but actually getting your product to market and if you do a tabletop game we know whether it makes it to market or not that's an easy one to check and so we look to see whether it was successful and making it to market and we also have users who rate every one of those games and so we have quality ratings about what came out and one of the things we found is that ap

pealing to the crowd and giving them co-design control and essentially giving people over your big backers the big fans the friends and fanatics it helps it get made and make it to market but it doesn't actually help much with quality in fact it hurts the quality um maybe letting my uncle my uncle frank design the game wasn't such a good design choice he's not that good at it okay but the other thing we found is that effect disappears once it's your second time out as a creator so for repeat cre

ators you don't have suffer from having to fail to manage your crowd on your second go around they get better at managing the crowd and so the second go around for these creators don't suffered any of these kinds of um they just are able to work with the masses and and bring it to market and and have better results all right i'm going to get to the end here um you can look at different trends in how we're funding things um [Music] i think there's big questions about how egalitarian crowdfunding

is or how egalitarian the kickstarter funding space is i think we should be asking questions about the distribution of resources on platforms like uh crowdfunding and we have the data to answer that i'm going to skip past some of those things to get you to uh one last bit of an example when we get into some blurbs or even just looking at the categories the content itself of what's on the in the kickstarter data is interesting so a colleague of mine alan collins out at nottingham trent during the

pandemic started talking about whether or not laughter might be the best medicine or maybe it's just too soon and so we looked at kickstarter data and we wanted to see when the pandemic strikes do we see more or less comedy now comedy is a subcategory it's actually a subcategory of film music publishing and theater it shows up in four different places and there's not a lot there's only less than one percent of projects three pandemic are in the comet one of these comedy subcategories if we look

at the blurbs themselves we look for funny words in there maybe two percent invoke humor now it's even less pandemic so maybe it's too soon but also over time there's a downward trend in the in any of these categories over time apparently kickstarter is getting more and more serious um and maybe that's a good thing maybe it's not but the levity is a quickly done graphic where time is on the horizontal axis in 2020 is this dotted green line the red line here are non-comedy projects the average d

ollars pledged and then the blue line here is average for the comedy projects we can see post 2020 it looks like there might be something happening there so comedies in general are much cheaper in terms of they raise less money it's cheaper to make a comedy than maybe some of the other things in your category but they actually have more backers per dollar than many other comedies they're pretty popular same success rates generally speaking but post 2020 we might see actually a spike in the comed

y in in the second quarter these are kinds of questions this is a bit of a silly one perhaps but it shows the potential of what we can do with the kickstarter data and so that's where i'm going to go as i close this most of what i showed here you can do essentially just using the restricted use data and then linking it to a couple things on the outside um you're going to want more kickstarter project details possibly depending on what you're going to do with your research and you're going to be

able to link to that to other data using location fields or the time stamps or even the categories in different sectors that the projects are in and linked to external other data sources so i think we're gonna there's lots of opportunity there um and and that's what part of what makes this great i think there's lots of good questions we should all be asking um lots of questions about trends in this data because this is a long time series data set now the panel is this is we've got a decade or mo

re we've more than decade of this and it's not just big end it's covering a lot has changed since kickstarter began so we can learn a lot i think and i think the nature of essentially online or crowdfunding communities what makes the tabletop games part different are there other things that are different in different ways of things that are similar i think we can learn a lot about developing these kinds of communities or not developing them we can learn a lot about the content of these campaigns

of the projects uh not just sort of the text content but other ways we might craft or think about the content in these projects and i think we should be paying a lot of attention to the evolution of the content that's up in kickstarter as a platform over time growth relative growth rates within and between the different subcategories i think are interesting to look at one of the biggest questions when we link to external data is going to be to look link all of this to arts and cultural particip

ation i'm curious to know about how these projects whether it's the creating of them or the backing of them how that sort of crowdfunding behavior links to behavior of arts and cultural participation especially when a lot of these projects are virtual and producing virtual outputs and products is that something that people are able to participate in and this is something that's fostering more and more arts and cultural participation in that in that sense but especially for the place-based ones a

s well what's it doing for participation there and then i think broadly there's big questions about crowdfunding as a substitute and as a compliment in some cases it's a better mousetrap it substitutes for something else we were already doing in other cases it just amplifies and makes other things more possible and so it can complement in some ways and substitute in others and i think those are really interesting questions to be asking and then as i mentioned earlier i'm a big fan of people prob

ing about downstream impacts and what happens after the fact it was interesting for us to track what happens to these tabletop games when they make it to market and many of them do some of them don't and some of them one day will and kickstarter has a bit in different categories for ability to have these uh creators actually deliver on products but i think it's even more interesting to think about the reputation that kickstarter has about not going beyond delivery of product but its impact on th

e reputation and professional development of the creators its impact on entire sort of fields of products right apple watches and and exercise machines and family not so friendly card games there's entire genres that have been inspired by and influenced by what goes on in kickstarter those downstream impacts are fascinating to think about as people are developing both from the individual perspective of the creator but also from the product line and other forms of innovation and then the last thi

ng i'll say here on other new questions is we i'm excited to see us all dig into this backer location um let's see a map of where all these backers are let's see how those the location of these backers uh map onto other resources on the other forms of wealth or other policies or other things other factors how does it map onto the location of where these projects are being cited uh how does it map onto arts and cultural participation in other versions of demand for creative work um i think we hav

e a lot we're gonna see from all this and i'm excited to to dig into it and so with that see we have some some questions in the q a i don't know what they are but i'm going to stop talking and take a peek thank you doug i wish i had more time to listen to to you talk about this this is really cool um just uh very quick before we get to questions um i wanted to say a few words about the data as john and doug mentioned the public use kickstarter data set is currently freely available on the natick

website anyone can go and download it and hit the ground running the restricted use kickstarter data set is coming up will be available soon uh and it will be available via the virtual data enclave vde and the data users will have to apply for access and sign the restricted data use agreement to be able to work with that data and uh now we are happy to take your questions there are a number of questions in the chat that i can just sort of run through very quickly probably um so i'm just going t

o take them in order um so who gets to see your kickstarter campaign does kickstarter expand our potential donors to a vast new group or are you sending info to your current donors and audiences the question is where does the where do backers come from really is it coming from the creator is it coming from kickstarter and the answer is both it's actually a very important question it's like one of the most important questions for us and one of the most difficult things to um assess this is someth

ing that i work on a lot of have revised very recently in a very important way but the right now uh it's a mix of both and very much depends on the project so in tabletop games because there's such a strong community on the platform typically you know you would see the the median successful project in tabletop gets 30 of its funding through people just discovering it on kickstarter and so 70 is driven by the creators marketing efforts um but that can go that that changes you know depending on th

e project site-wide i think the median the median successful campaign gets about 24 of its funding through uh what we would attribute to kickstarter discovery um our community discovering the project through kickstarter channels of just like people coming to the website people who have the app people who structure our newsletters things like that uh versus the creator's marketing but again wide variety what is kickstarter charge uh it kickstarter charges nothing to list but kickstarter takes fiv

e percent of all successfully raised funds there's also a credit we use strike for for payment processing so there's also strike fees associated with payment processing um how often will the data be updated to include more years of data so that would be more recent years because we've already gone back to the beginning of kickstarter time i believe that we're trying to do this on an annual basis is my recollection um so we will try to update it on an annual basis i don't have a lot of bandwidth

i wear a lot of hats right now i'm trying to keep the wheels on the bus at kickstarter um i'll just jump in and say i think this is an ongoing conversation between the national endowment for the arts you guys and and icps are about what what's a doable cadence so that sounds that sounds right right now all this basically just falls to me so it's a question when i can jam it in my schedule um and make sure i get past the lawyers uh how long do project pages stay up forever uh in very rare cases w

e we need to take them down but the privilege are we and we de-index uh unsuccessful campaigns from just google search but everything it remains up on the site we think that's important to have that that long-term record are there times of the year that influence the number of backers um yes absolutely they're the major there's a lot of seasonality on the platform um very significant seasonality the there's a little bit of a summer lull uh it's a little bit more pronounced in europe um but there

's a big lull actually in the christmas time so we're kind of the exact opposite of e-commerce which like spikes starting around thanksgiving heading into christmas and we just sort of just start tanking in terms of activity uh shortly before thanksgiving because kickstarter you're not shopping for something you're going to get right away you don't kickstart a shop or something you're going to get for christmas so everybody's focused on like stuff they're going to get right now and so creators d

on't want to launch projects people stay off the platform and then after the new year we start ramping back up so our nader is right at new year uh new year's day basically new year's eve and then we start sort of building back up um our kickstarter contributions are tax deductible to non-profit arts organizations they certainly can be if the creator is a non-profit arts organization you can issue tax deductible uh tax deduction receipts to your backers uh that's on the creator is their relation

ship with shark tank uh no although there's plenty of kickstarter funded products on shark tank there's no relationship there um is there any way to know the relative income of the average backer uh no i mean we have google analytics um and stuff like that which can give us some uh of those bands and numbers uh for our audience but there's that's not data that we're sharing nor is the data that we have that's very reliable you can also use yeah you might uh use some location data to try to get s

ome of those things in general you know backers particularly like our engaged backer community people are pledging um you know our baseline for an engaged backer someone's pledging once every 90 days but we have people that are pledging to multiple projects every week these are people that have disposable income they often have a room dedicated in their house all the things that they acquire they're of a funny population um very generous and uh yeah just funny to hang out with because i've done

events with them um no question but in observation we use kickstarter as a nonprofit organization and raised our second 25 000 in half the time than traditional methods so i don't know what the solarity effect is but um yeah so this is someone who's using kickstarter to say that they raised money more quickly than traditional methods and and this is where that sort of time window and all or nothing components kind of are mechanisms to really accelerate funding right it creates a you're either in

or out it creates real meaningful stakes for the creator and for their community to say like no i'm gonna chip in here um and that's why it's also part of the reason why we keep that structure even though people are like i just want all the money i can possibly scrounge for a non-profit and i understand but we've done research back in the day and we haven't done it recently but that shows that you raised significantly more money with this model than you would otherwise but it does create rest u

h will you be partnering with art basel again um i don't know i'd have to ask our director of arts patton i know we've done dinners at art basel miami in the past for artists and i have no idea if we're doing it again but thank you for the question um can you give examples what backers get back or awards okay these are great um yes typically the the core reward will be the thing that is being made right if you're making a film it's getting a link to the film or copy it's a copy of the film if it

's a if it's oculus rift you get a vr headset you get uh the tabletop game you get these things um at a lower level it can be at the lowest level tends to be just like a shout out on social media which is barely a reward um but they might do previous versions of their book or something like that and eat i mean you might have like a digital version of the book and then like a hardcover version of the book at really high levels thousand to ten thousand dollars is the max you can pledge you get thi

ngs that are like a producer credit on a film you get um distributor level rewards so you're not just getting one tabletop game you're getting 50 because you are a tabletop hobby shop owner and you actually are stocking that on your shelves um those are you might get signed versions of the of it or you get giant bundles where you're just like the creator is putting 20 things into a single reward tier to just sort of max it out um have we partnered with local governments to fund projects in their

communities with matching funds to support initiatives that align with their cultural policies not with local governments um but we have started to one of my hats uh i started a program like kickstarter called forward funds originally called patrons um we currently have uh kind of rebooted it with our first new ford fund in a while um so we are partnering with the skull foundation and creative capital which is a non-profit and basically because most of the campaigns on kickstarter are not non-p

rofits they're just individuals foundations cannot give money directly to into campaigns on kickstarter these foundations are restricted in the way that they can use their money and have to give it to basically non-profits typically and there's also huge transaction costs anytime foundations give out money so we created a scheme uh he called money laundering for good where uh the skull foundation has given a five hundred thousand dollar grant to creative capital and creative capitals and non-pro

fit is using those funds to pledge into projects from bypoc creators on kickstarter and what's amazing about this sort of program is that you can put small amounts of capital into a huge number of projects um all over the country that are very accessible in a way that traditionally foundations and these non you know these like new york city-based nonprofits just aren't and they can't operate this kind of scale so we can actually provide scale to their funding and leverage small amounts of capita

l to help creators unlock larger capitals putting one thousand dollars into a ten thousand dollar campaign that's all or nothing funding is really really impactful so there's a lot of stuff that i would actually love to know the dynamics of putting a thousand dollars early into a campaign early on on that first day or two and how that changes the trajectory of their funding if you want research prompt um and then is there a relationship with americans for the arts clearance uh not them aware i d

on't think that was everything i think doug just answered that question right i added in i mean yeah i don't think kickster has a relationship but you could try to relate the data to what american for the arts is doing with their aep studies and based on the location and time and see if um if there was a relationship between kickstarter activity and what kinds of things americans for the arts is tracking an interesting study there's one question oh what projects ah great question oh man getting

yeah so do projects identifies by puck yes uh we have a survey in the project build process where we ask creators to identify across a number of demographic uh it's opt-in obviously and we have to manage that data very very carefully and people opt-in for us to share their project with creative capital um based on that criteria so people can opt-in people can opt-in to telling us their demographic information or not and then separately opt into us using that data to recommend their projects to f

unders essentially but we obviously have to manage that data very carefully because it's very sensitive how large is the kickstarter team it's pretty much it's just me um no there's about a hundred of us i've just been a kickstarter for like eight years now and so it's 100 people at a company that is operating at a scale that is pretty significant um and so yeah i will go from this to a meeting about our union i also negotiate our union contract so i have to go do that um it doesn't make any sen

se there's there's too many ads my team of insights um is seven people so i've got two two data scientists three researchers one strategy analytics experimentation purpose person and that's it i want to take this opportunity to thank you both for a wonderfully interesting presentation you've given me lots of fun things to think about and i want to thank the people who have joined us a couple people asked about whether the slides and presentation would be made available they will you'll get an uh

note in your email with those once they are up but thank you both for participating in love dataweek 2022. thank you lynette thank you john [Music]