Friday, October 28, 2011

Wrong takeaway

From Kickstarter Funding by Days of the Week,
Richard Bliss, Purple Pawn, 10/28/2011
Richard Bliss over at the Purple Pawn posted some graphs of Kickstarter game project funding campaign success.  He implies, I think, that starting your campaign on Sunday might make it more likely to be successful. I think that's a misreading of the data. I think the graph actually reflects merely the frequency of campaign starts per day, not the probability of success per day.  If I'm right, that means most people begin campaigns on Sunday, which makes sense; you work all week and then use the weekend to put your finishing touches on the project, then post it on Sunday. To make the point the article suggests, what you'd actually need is a percent of campaigns that were successful plotted by the day they started.  My guess is that this would be nearly flat.

I think the day-of-week thing is probably nearly irrelevant to project success, since most of the campaigns run several weeks to two months.  If anything, you might actually want to AVOID a Sunday start so as not to be hidden by the deluge of new projects coming out on the weekend.  Wednesday is your friend. Unless of course people only browse projects over the weekend too...

2 comments:

  1. Dave, I had the same thought when I first saw the graphs, having a high number of successful projects on Sunday is meaningless data by itself. However, combining two of the graphs in the article can yield something valuable. An ending day of Monday has a vastly lower number of of projects than Sunday, yet still beats it in dollars per day. This shows that Monday is an extremely potent day, with many projects having ended the previous day and high amounts of money coming into Kickstarter, you're competing with fewer people for the largest pot.

    Of course, this really only matters if you're on the bubble of being funded. And that situation argues even more strongly for an ending day of Monday.

    When you're on the bubble, you want to make a big plea at the end to push you over the top. If people are most willing to shop online on a Monday, then that is the day you want to ask for their money. People are (relatively) less likely to shop online on a weekend. They'll do that to escape the drudgery of going back to work on Monday. But if your campaign ended Sunday, then they miss out on the chance to be the funder who meets your goal.

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  2. Interesting analysis. I missed that it was ending day rather than starting day, which makes some of my comments up there irrelevant. An high probability of an ending day of Sunday for game projects may mean that people tend to choose Sunday as an end, or there might be some other explanations. If I were doing it, I don't know why you wouldn't go with the full 60-day timetable, but maybe people are looking to move faster.

    My suspicion is that there are a bunch of other factors (e.g. nature and appeal of your project, quality of your video and presentation on Kickstarter, size of your group of friends and acquaintances) that are far more important than the day of the week stuff, but it's probably worth paying attention to the second- or third-order things like this if you have the information.

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