Analytics: Kickstarter April 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 in April remained stable at 25% as playing card backers remained caution ahead of a few high profile non-Kickstarter launches: the Hive deck, Kings Wild Tally-Ho, LUXX, and Whispering Imps v2. Having said that, the year-to-date (YTD) numbers continue to surpass 2013 numbers. The chart below describes how 2014 is tracking against the numbers from 2013 as benchmark.

Playing Card Projects 

The number of unsuccessful projects fell to 13% in April. This is offset by the percentage increase of cancelled projects, 21% (up 10% from last month). This increase is partly due to the launch of several playing cards with copyrighted materials, which was subsequently cancelled.

Here is what the month looked like in numbers:

Majority of the projects launched in April were launched mid to end of the month.

Here's a look at how projects performed over the month. The % of successful projects this month remained similar to that of last month.

Funding

A total of $791k was raised by all projects in April, relatively on par with last month.

With no surprise, Kings Wild's The Independence ($117k) was the most funded this month.

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

The top 5 successful playing cards projects for the month contributed 53% to the overall funding of successful projects!

The average YTD funding goal of successful project is $14.1k. We maintained that the average funding goal stabilize around the $15k mark.

Backers 

Approximately 19.7k backers were recorded across all projects in April. The average pledge per backer decreased to $44 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 April:

The Atelier is the surprise winner this month with it's minimalist deck. Historically, minimalist deck never seem to do well on Kickstarter.  The project had a good start on day 1, but the project took off on day 5 when major news networks made the connection between the creator and his former employer, Apple.

Kardify's very own Aquila Playing Cards ($23k) had a good start and was funded in just over 7 days and are now pushing for the stretch goals. Thank you for all your support!

As expected, the momentum have stabilize this month and we expect the numbers to be remain constant next month before things pick up during summer.


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