Over our first two years, the projects that have given themselves the most amount of time to reach their funding goal have actually made their goal less often than any other projects on Kickstarter. The overall success rate is 44%, but for 90 day projects (our max) it’s 24%.
We can’t say for certain why this is the case, but we have a few guesses. For one, 90 days is a long time, and more time does not create more urgency. Instead it makes it easier for backers to procrastinate, and sometimes they forget to come back at all.
More time doesn’t help the project creator either. Though the funding deadline may seem to be a project’s enemy, it’s actually its ally (more on that in a second). And don’t overlook how much effort a project requires. Even far shorter durations can be fatiguing for a creator.
With those things in mind, today we’re lowering the maximum amount of time a creator can choose for their project from 90 days to 60 days. This only affects projects that have yet to launch. Any previously launched project with a duration over 60 days will see no changes with their project.
To give you an idea of what lead us to this decision, let’s look at a graph that shows how a project’s funding duration and its success rate are correlated:
Project Duration vs. Success Rate
(Click the image for full resolution)
The horizontal axis represents how long a creator chose for their duration and the vertical axis represents what percentage of those projects were successfully funded. As you can see with the line through the middle, historically the more time a project has given itself the less likely it has been to reach its goal.
This doesn’t mean that those longer projects failed to reach their goal because of the longer funding period, or that choosing a 30-day (our recommendation) duration would have caused them to succeed. Rather it means that choosing a shorter duration better positions a project for success.
The following graph, which represents every pledge ever made on Kickstarter in relation to when in the project’s lifecycle it occurred, explains:
Pledge Distribution Over Time
Here the horizontal axis represents the project’s timeline from beginning (the far left) to end (far right) and the vertical axis represents the frequency of pledges.
As the graph illustrates, funding tends to cluster around the very beginning and very end of a campaign. There’s a logic to this. When a project launches the creator’s most fervent fans rush to show their support. And as time runs out, people who have been sitting on the sidelines are motivated to finally take action.
During the middle periods of a project pledging slows considerably. It’s a trough. Without the excitement of the new or the looming deadline’s call to action, projects need external stimuli (press, events, milestones) to generate activity. This is not always easy to do.
What projects with longer durations are primarily doing, then, is extending the trough. A more compressed time-frame minimizes the slower weeks and places greater emphasis on the beginning and end. There’s an inherent momentum that carries a project through, and keeps backers engaged and excited. We believe shorter durations will extend that experience to more projects.
We think a lot about how and why projects succeed on Kickstarter, and we do our best to apply what we learn. More than 24,000 projects have launched to date and each has been an opportunity to better understand what works and what doesn’t. We look forward to continuing to share those lessons with you. Thanks!
Comments
Creator Cameron Brown on June 20, 2011
Solid analysis, and decisive action. Love it.
Creator Steve Nelson on June 21, 2011
I'm not sure how you would break down this query, but could you compare the length of time + dollar amount? I would think that small $ projects are more often successful than large $ projects. And that small $ projects tend to have shorter timespans. So it may be skewing these results a bit. Logically it seems that a $500 project is more likely to be successful in 10 days than a $5000 project is in 10 days. What would be useful is some way to identify the ideal time frame based on the dollar amount of the project.
Creator Xuan Chen on June 21, 2011
I totally agree with you, Steve Nelson. I think the project duration should be adjusted according to the goal of the fund. This statistics needs more thorough study.
Creator Shane Patrick LaGrange on June 22, 2011
As a first timer to Kickstarter, i certainly take all the blogs and information to good use, but I recently saw something on two words that should not e used in the proposal. Please help out so i can finish my opening remarks, and get my video going.Sincerely,
Shane LaGrange
Creator Emery on June 24, 2011
Come on guys. Correlation does not imply causation.
It looks like you almost had it, you were so close, with:
"This doesn’t mean that those longer projects failed to reach their goal because of the longer funding period"
And then, you pull back - it's just too sweet to be illogical and jump to assumptions. Real science is too hard! And:
"Rather it means that choosing a shorter duration better positions a project for success."
Your evidence, does not, in any way, suggest that. It is just as plausible, that projects more likely to fail are prone to choosing longer durations.
Creator Neil Kandalgaonkar on June 24, 2011
Emery: I'm not sure it matters. Kickstarter doesn't need to know the direction of causation.
Hypothesis 1: project founders who choose 90-day campaigns tend to be failures
Hypothesis 2: 90-day campaigns tend to cause any project to fail
The remedy is the same: go to 60-day campaigns. Whether this eliminates the flaky projects, or ensures projects have less likelihood of going flaky, doesn't matter to Kickstarter.
(I'm assuming that a project that doesn't get to full funding is just useless deadweight on their site, taking up screen real estate, reducing overall good experience, increasing transaction costs, etc.)
Creator Larry Murray on June 30, 2011
I would be curious to see if there was any seasonal impact...
Creator Geoff Brown on July 11, 2011
Does Kickstarter have any data on demographic things like age, gender, income, amount pledged, etc.? That might shed some light on "who is the real audience" and how do they react?" Just wondering if Kickstarter has ever researched this.
Creator Roy Ronalds on July 15, 2011
@neil: actually with hypothesis 1 we can assume that changing the time limit is not going to stop failing projects from starting campaigns, so the same failil projects will start, they'll just still fail.
Creator Liz Caldwell on November 22, 2011
Great advice, thanks :)
Creator Allen Enriquez on March 19, 2012
What about those of us who want to create traditional (2d) animation? Animating isn't easy when you're just a one man team, specially on a 60 day limit.
Creator Vincent Lynch on April 2, 2012
@Allen: I may be misunderstanding the post or Kickstarter, but I dont think the duration of the fundraising impacts the duration you have to complete the project. All they are doing is making it so the maximum amount of time you have to raise the money is 60 days instead of 90.
You still have more time than that to do the actual project.
Creator ET3D on April 23, 2012
Steve Nelson, projects such as Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 and some others with hundreds of thousands as a goal got funded within a day, so I don't think that there's a relation between the amount of money to be raised and the time period. What I think longer periods allow is for changes to the project and rewards to satisfy more backers. These are often not easy to arrange quickly, so very short projects would struggle to do them, and they are often important to help raised more money. Still, I agree that 90 days is too much, and as a backer I appreciate projects around 30 days, as Kickstarter recommends.
Creator Tim Carter (deleted) on June 19, 2012
Yes, I agree Emery.
This ultimately is a two-dimensional study. It needs to be three-dimensional.
It may very well be that there is a trend among Kickstarters seeking larger amounts of money to use longer campaign durations. So it may not be the length of time at all that is causing failure, but instead the size of the ask.
Creator Charles Waugh on June 21, 2012
I'm a bit miffed that KS wants to 'mother' the process.
Why not allow longer durations?
Is it server load? Staff load?
If someone has a reason (bad or good) for running a longer project why block them?
Is this part of a trend towards more 'We know what's good for you' oversight?
Yeah, I have lots of questions, so I must be miffed.
:-)
Of course, KS's business model is enhanced by having a higher percentage of success, but isn't that a bit like ignoring to teach the lowest percentile of the school's students so the overall average score goes up? It penalizes those who need to learn by doing. My first project bombed (thankfully!) - a year later I came back and raised $70k on a design project (like #60 of all top funded design projects). It took the failure to learn what to do. If you trim the failures off, you limit learning - which limits your base to a smaller, already well-funded group.
I'll stop now.
:-)
Creator Anne Moroney on May 2
How does the data look when cross-analyzed versus size of goal? Doesn't a $100k project need alot more time to get social media traction than a $10k or $1k project? Couldn't someone who is in charge of such a large project be the exact one who is able to spin a great story out over the course of several months?
Creator Richard Gray 3 days ago
Picking up on Larry Murray's point of June 2011, does anyone have any data//comment on the seasonal impact of funding projects? We're planning to launch a project in July right into the holiday period. Feedback very welcome.