Blogger Jonathon Lau and partner Edward Junprung have posted an article which claims that “Dollar for dollar raised, Kickstarter dominates Indiegogo Six times over”. They basically scraped the Indieogogo platform and added it all up. The data they are working with is available here. Kickstarter has always made their data freely available on their site.
Lau’s article states several insights:
6 Eye Opening Insights
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Cumulatively, Kickstarter (KS) has over 110,000 campaignswhile our scrape found 44,000 campaigns on Indiegogo (IGG). However, through multiple scrapes over a month, we discovered that IGG de-list failed campaigns that raised less than $500.
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KS ($612M) has successfully raised over 6 times more dollarsthan IGG ($98M).
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KS has had 40 projects raise $1M+ while IGG only has had 3.
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The average success rate on KS is 44%. Based on the total number of campaigns we found in our scrape, we calculate IGG’s success rate to be 34%. However, if we factor in the de-listed failed campaigns, IGG’s success rate drops significantly.
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At the time of the scrape, KS and IGG had near the same unsuccessful dollars (KS $83M vs IGG $70M) despite KS raising over 6 times more money
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40% of dollars that IGG raised were generated from campaigns that raised more than $100,000
In an article on TechCrunch, which covered the claim, the publication says that Indiegogo states,
“that the data compiled by Lau and Junprung is “completely false,” but it hasn’t offered any data to reveal the true numbers in terms of total successful funding amounts to counter their proposed figures.”
What we should all understand is these two crowdfunding leaders have very different approaches to rewards based crowdfunding. Indiegogo pretty much let’s anything go – within reason. They do not see themselves as the overlord of the world of crowdfunding and let the crowd decide. This has allowed some pretty specious crowdfunding campaigns to unfortunately see the light of a computer screen (this one is crazy). Indiegogo is also a flexible funding platform which allows funds to transfer even if the goal is not reached.
Kickstarter on the other hand curates their platform and have rejected many projects as they are not in line with their guidelines or – at times – offerings are killed for no apparent reason.
In the end these numbers represent a moment in time for an industry which is growing dramatically. By this time next year these numbers will seem small. And if equity crowdfunding is allowed to flourish – as it should – then these numbers will be viewed as a pittance.