The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter

Pt 101413

The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter @ NYTimes.com.

With so many ideas pouring in, Kickstarter could adopt a passive stance and simply let “the Internet” take over. But instead, approved projects often get a little advice: make a video, adjust your rewards, lower your funding goal and so on. Kickstarter is as much about unlocking creators’ marketing potential as their creative potential. The company takes a cut — 5 percent — of the money raised on successful projects. (The transactions are processed through an Amazon.com service, which takes a slightly smaller cut.) The founders say it is profitable.


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1 Comment

  1. My biggest frustration with Kickstarter is the lack of reporting. They offer no way to add Google Analytics tracking and don’t provide their own. So our project (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1776521681/laser-cut-eiffel-tower#) doesn’t look like it’s going to succeed, but we don’t know why. It would be useful to know how many people visited, how many started the video, how many finished the video, how many clicked on donate and didn’t complete the process, etc. I found a way to insert a fake image that called a script that pinged Google Analytics, but that only counts hits. Because it doesn’t use Javascript, it can’t get any of the other details normally available in those reports. When I contacted them about this, they said they lacked the bandwidth to offer statistics. Yet, they opt to host the videos on their servers rather than YouTube or Vimeo, which limits you to a small, non HD version. Kickstarter is a great site, and there are some genius ideas there. But it’s not even clear when looking at other’s projects, why some get funded and some do not.

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