Quick Analysis of the Kickstarter Stats page reveals the Expected Value of a succesful Kickstarter campaign by catagory.
Expected Value of Kickstarter Projects by Catagory
All £4,218
Art £2,082
Comics £4,528
Dance £2,527
Design £18,503
Fashion £2,260
Film & Video £3,681
Food £4,301
Games £16,819
Music £2,949
Photography £1,995
Publishing £1,837
Technology £11,903
Theater £2,778
Here we can see the return for a succesful Kickstarter project is heavily skewed toward Design, Games and Technology kickstarter campaigns. This is specifically because of the dominant male video game nerd/geek catagory (see Reddit.com/slashdot etc.) who are most susceptible to hype marketing online (See Notch and Minecraft, Humble Indie Bundle etc.).
Other interesting analysis results in the following table for Kickstarter project success rates.
Success Rate of Kickstarter Projects by Catagory
All 44.01%
Art 48.42%
Comics 45.15%
Dance 70.04%
Design 35.90%
Fashion 26.95%
Film & Video 39.55%
Food 40.89%
Games 34.03%
Music 54.34%
Photography 37.97%
Publishing 31.41%
Technology 30.24%
Theater 64.53%
It’s a good idea to remember that Kickstarter projects, especially succesful ones, are heavily skewed towards hype marketing. This makes data analysis less relevant due to the difficulty of accurately measuring the level of hype marketing a particular Kickstarter project engaged in. The reliance of Kickstarter on hype marketing also makes it difficult to see which projects are funded because they’re great and which are funded because of mob mentality setting in.
Since not every Kickstarter project can fund or engage in hype marketing it means anyone looking into starting a Kickstart project “for profit” with no particular preference has little information of use available. Even the above analysis of Kickstarter project succeses and expected returns is useless for anyone looking to start. Essentially, any Kickstarter project catagory is equally as good as any other until we can obtain data regarding where funders came from and why they chose to fund a particular Kickstarter.
You can find the kickstarter stats page at the link here (new window).
