Kickstarter Owns Indiegogo With Around 6X More Total Dollars Raised, Average Success Rate Much Higher

Kickstarter Owns Indiegogo With Around 6X More Total Dollars Raised, Average Success Rate Much Higher Aug 30th 2013, 10:10, by Darrell Etherington Indiegogo seems to always play second fiddle to Kickstarter, despite the fact that it was on the crowdfund scene first, and now someone’s done the math to figure out exactly how the two compare. Freelancers working in the crowdfunding space Jonathan Lau and Edward Junprung scraped Indiegogo’s website to derive comparable numbers to those Kickstarter makes available free on its own website via its stats page, and the results are eye-opening. Kickstarter has had over 110,000 campaigns run on its site according to its own data, while the scrape run by Lau and Junprung found about 44,000 campaigns total on Indiegogo. That number contrasts with the reported 142,301 that appears to be the last publicly available figure regarding total campaigns on Indiegogo, but the discrepancy is likely explained by the fact that Indiegogo delists campaigns that are unsuccessful and that raise fewer than $500, a practice which would skew data derived from a scrape vs. that taken from whole, internal values like those found on KS. Indiegogo campaigns were found to have raised far fewer successful dollars than Indiegogo, with around $98 million total all-time, while Kickstarter had about six times that, or $612 million. Kickstarter has had 40 projects cross the $1 million threshold, with only 3 doing the same on Indiegogo, and Kickstarter’s average success rate is 44 percent, while Indiegogo’s is around 34 percent (which doesn’t take into account the many delisted projects that failed to raise at least $500. Including those delisted efforts, the previously reported 9.3 percent success rate on 142,301 total campaigns matches up nicely. Despite hosting many more successful projects, unsuccessful dollars raised (in other words, those associated with projects that didn’t meet their goal) on both platforms is around the same, with Kickstarter seeing $83 million raised and Indiegogo only slightly behind at $70 million. Indiegogo’s money raised is also disproportionately resting on the shoulders of just a few projects, with 40 percent of its total funds attributable to campaigns that passed $100,000 in funding. Kickstarter is generally perceived as the number one crowdfunding site on the web, and it looks like that perception is well-deserved according to the numbers. Which isn’t to say Indiegogo’s necessarily doing anything wrong; there’s a place for a site with fewer barriers to listing, the ability to run flexible funding campaigns and the chance to get a bit more foolishly ambitious, to be sure. But the very different nature of the two sites from a balance sheet perspective could lead to an ever-widening gap in the type of content we see from both, and the way potential backers view each as well. Check out Lau and Junprung’s full chart of figures here if you’re interested in digging deeper into the data or disputing their findings.