Analytics: Kickstarter March 2014

With the increased interest in crowd-funded playing card projects particularly on Kickstarter, we are publishing a monthly tracking report as part of our popular Analytics series. The goal is to give an analytical insight into the month-on-month performance of projects and how these numbers are tracking cumulatively year-to-date.

The number of funded projects slipped 17% in March as playing card backers turned cautions ahead of a few high profile launch, the Hive deck, Zenith, LUXX, Hot Cakes and Whispering Imps v2. However, the year-to-date numbers continue to surpass those from the same time last year. The chart below describes how this year is tracking against the numbers from 2013 as benchmark.

Playing Card Projects 

The number of unsuccessful projects rose 22% this month. We see this as a persistent trend for the next month or two as competition increase and hence more choices for backers.

Here is what the month looked like in numbers:

Projects launched in March are equally spread through out the month.

Meanwhile, a here is how projects performed over the month. The % of successful projects this month decreased 6% and as noted, an increase in the % of unsuccessful projects.

Funding

A total of $788k was raised by all projects in March. This is 17% higher than the prior month.

The White Ornate ($118k) designed by Randy Butterfield was the most funded this month. The unlocking of the stunning Black Obsidian deck stretched goal pushed the final funding over the $100k mark.

Here is a look at the top 5 most funded playing cards:

The top 5 successful playing cards projects for the month contributed 76% to the overall funding of successful projects!

Similar to last month, the average funding goal of successful project is $11.3k. This reduced the YTD average to $13.1k. We maintained that the average funding goal stabilize around the $15k mark.

Backers 

Approximately 18.1k backers were recorded across all projects in March. The average pledge per backer increased to $51 this month.

The following is a month-on-month comparison for 2014 with the 2013 curve used as benchmark.

Top 5 funded Projects by backer numbers below:

Launched Projects 

Here are the top 10 most funded projects launched in March:

As expected, Kings Wild's the Independence deck lead the chart by a huge margin. The project reached its $60k funding goal in just 10 hours. Also, the average spent per backer for the Independence is $84.8. Amazing!

The momentum seem to have stabilize this month and we expect the numbers to be consistent next month as well before things pick up during summer.


Data provider: