10,000 Successful Projects
Share this post
On July 6th, a project called Citizen is releasing a 7” record! from a band in Toledo, Ohio, was funded by 28 backers, becoming the 10,000th successfully funded project in Kickstarter history.
Ten thousand successful projects is a big milestone. Watching projects from every corner of the creative spectrum come to life has been a wonderful thing, and to see what they've accomplished in aggregate is remarkable. Congrats to Citizen and the 9,999 other projects that made their accomplishment possible!
To celebrate, let's take a look at a few other milestones that Kickstarter has reached since our two-year anniversary post in April.
Project Statistics (current as of 7/17/2011)
Launched Projects: 26,620
Successful Projects: 10,388
Unsuccessful Projects: 13,113
Live Projects: 3,119
Success Rate: 44%
The march towards 10,000 successfully funded projects has accelerated a lot over the past two years. Exactly one year ago today Kickstarter had seen a lifetime total of 1,885 successful projects. The past year alone has seen nearly five times that.
In a strange coincidence, the number of projects funded in Kickstarter's first year (1,044) is exactly the same as the number funded just last month (1,044).
How do these 10,000 funded projects break down by category?
If you compare the graph above to the funding total by category graph we shared in our birthday post, you'll see some similarities, but quite a few differences too. Music and Film dominate with 60% of the successful projects overall, but below that there are a number of shifts. Note, for example, how Dance has seen more successful projects than Design or Technology.
How much money did those 10,000 projects raise? The most common projects on Kickstarter are not blockbusters like Diaspora or the Jay DeMerit doc, but smaller projects that raise $5,000 or less.
Pledge Statistics
Total Pledged: $75,262,447
Dollars Collected (successful projects): ~$60 million
Dollars Uncollected (unsuccessful projects): ~$9 million
Live Dollars (currently funding projects): ~$6 million
In April we announced that Kickstarter had reached $50 million in pledges. Ten weeks later we've crossed $75 million. How long did it take for each $5 million increment to be raised?
The Y-axis represents the number of days it took for $5 million to be pledged, and the X-axis represents each $5 million increment. The first $5 million in pledges took 342 days to accumulate, while the most recent took just 18 days.
Backer Statistics
Backers: 793,362
Repeat Backers: 118,308
We've seen a similar growth in the number of backers and repeat backers. The repeat backer number is particularly encouraging, as that represents a return audience on Kickstarter. Repeat backers account for 13% of all backers, but 28% of dollars pledged. They've contributed more than $20 million so far.
The Kickstarter staff, of course, includes some of the biggest repeat backers on the site. In April we reported that the staff had backed 1,590 projects; as of July that number has climbed to 2,168 projects.
Your moment of non-ZenAs a final gift we leave you with a video that crams screenshots of all 10,000 successful projects into five-and-a-half minutes, organized from lowest funding total raised to highest. Warning: if you have photosensitive epilepsy or an aversion to weird, possibly brainwashing videos, you may want to skip.
We'd like to congratulate every one of the 10,000-plus projects that have already been successfully funded, and thank the hundreds of thousands of backers who made it happen. Couldn't have done it without you!
Recent posts
- Toward Better 3D Printers: A New Test From Autodesk and Kickstarter
- Mark Your Calendars: 16 Kickstarter-Funded Performances to Watch in NYC This Fall
- 2 Million People Have Pledged $100M to Art on Kickstarter
- Announcing NFTS Platform!, a New Initiative to Support the Next Generation of Filmmakers
- A Look Back at Kickstarter’s First-Ever Summer of Poetry
Che Beckford on
Congratulations to every successful person. Every single person. We have CONTROL
Ja Wyn on
so good.. now bring the ideals over to the united kingdom.. we want a fair go at this goodness... this greatness... keep on kickstartin'... ja wyn....x
Odair Panoinko Correa on
Fantastic, go go go kickstarter !!!
Tom Petty on
Great analysis. Amazing statistics, amazing growth. Well done!
Burton Posey on
This is so cool. Hopeful that my project will be one of the 10,388+ successful ones. Thanks for sharing!
Daryn Nakhuda on
Congratulations, very awesome milestone!
Scott A. Johnson on
As one of those success stories, I just want to say Thank You to Kickstarter for having this service!
Todd C. Roberts on
Pretty amazing, self-empowering, life-affirming stuff. Congrats!
Erik Hersman on
Stunning success here. Well done!
Maxwell Wessel on
Congratulations guys. More than the 10,000 projects, think of all the people you've affected by enabling those creators. Bravo.
Swapnil on
this is just great news :) congrats! Now pleeeeeeeeeease think of doing this for international projects also! please :)
Allison Torneros on
Congratulations Kickstarter!! Such a great concept here and I'm glad to be taking part. Best of luck for the future!
Timothy Bristol on
I'm hoping to add to the successful projects in the next few weeks. congrats to the 10,000.
Eddie Tsai on
We are part of that struggling fashion category...
Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot on
I'd love to see a bar graph of successful and unsuccessful projects by category. Is there a category that's particularly difficult or relatively 'easy' to get funding in?
Muescha on
Wow ... So much money! And with the money What kickstarter get from the eprojects for handing it is not possible to change this little thing which is annoying for kickstarters with many starred projects:
- make the starred project list sortabe by enddate
Why: the list is in a random order and i have to go over all my starred projects (now 4 pages) to find projects which are ending soon.
It it a little and small change !!!!!
Gary King on
congrats and thank you for what you've done for the film community! So cool to see our film in that amazing video!
Scott Lininger on
Thank you so much Kickstarter... you guys are changing indie publishing.
nathan waire on
AWESOME!!!! I HAVE ALREADY TWEETED THIS! KICKSTARTER should call itself KICK@$$ cause you guys RAWK!!!
eugenio on
one for all and all for one!!!!! cheers my friends!!!!
Arthur Van De Graaf on
That's the way to do it! Congratulations form a beginning returning backer!
Victor Wedel on
Congratulations Kickstarter! What you created, gives everyone a chance to expose their own creativity, helps the economy and gives all of us something to enjoy!!! Congrats to all who have participated in this incredible and innovative product/company/gift...
Jeremy Wilker on
Whoa. Awesomely fast timelapse! So cool to see all the successful pages and that dollar total increase along the way to 10,000 (and I found us! we are in the 5:01 minute mark with TRIUMPH67. Gary King is in the 5:28 minute with Schermann Song!).
Andi Arifianto on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
George Kouvaras on
Awsome! But please, become international...
There are people with ideas in Europe as well!
Arnold Großegesse on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
Markus Hofer on
When are you going to start accepting projects from non-US-citizens?
Edwin C. on
Congrats! I also did my own tiny analysis of Kickstarter data a couple months ago (http://blog.echen.me/2011/04/25/kickstarter-data-analysis-success-and-pricing/), so I'm admittedly especially pleased to see that the data I was able to gather on successful projects by category closely matches the full dataset =D (and hopefully the other data I gathered matches the full data as well).
Brian August on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
René Klein on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
thomas lehman on
Kickstarter, we just launched our MySaver project and I hope that weare in the 44% of the funded projects. As the guy above said, we are, (or can be) in control.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
Chris Pimlott on
A successfully-funded project and a successful project are not the same thing. Getting funded is just the start; the project itself is a success only once the backers have gotten their rewards and the makers have done what they set out to do. I'd be interested to see those kind of statistics.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
Maurizio Brugnetti on
Nice idea
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
lflb81 on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
deleted on
This comment has been removed by Kickstarter.
Greg Hydle on
Congratulations Kickstarter! We are ramping toward the end of our project now - getting exciting :) — http://kck.st/p2sqAz