Kickstarter: Shorter project durations lead to higher funding rates | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter: Shorter project durations lead to higher funding rates

kickstarter.com

20 pointsc0riander7 comments

Also interesting in the graph, 30, 45, 60, and 90 day durations are quite popular and significantly poorer at getting funded than other durations.

Is the kind of person that picks a number like that less able to write a convincing story? Is there something about seeing those unthoughtful numbers that turns off donors?

Turning that around: perhaps people pick non-round, non-default periods when they already have other hard external deadlines to work around, and such deadlines also drive other positive activity.

I've had a lot of friends try Kickstarter for various projects, most have chosen to start longer campaigns under the assumption that more time will increase the chance of funding the project.

Personally, I agree with Kickstarter's assessment that longer campaigns create less urgency. This seems to make sense. Often times, If I see a friend has a longer running campaign, I'll procrastinate and put off donating until later in the game. I'm sure other people do this too, and not all of them remember.

In the campaigns my friends have run, it's usually that first push out to their social network that gets the biggest response, after that the donations start slowing down. A few more people will kick in some extra dough at the end (like me), but by that time most people have moved on.

I disagree with limiting to 60 days instead. Educate your users, but some may very well have a good reason to choose 90... Like they expect a TV appearance in 75 days.

That person would have to wait 30 days to list the project in order to bank on the buzz from the tv appearance.

That example is just off the top of my head, but the point is that some of the world doesn't work at the pace of the web.

I disagree with your logic. You can find a good reason for anything. For example, Kickstarter chose to make funding a project an all-or-nothing deal (either you raise all your funding or none of it). This creates a sense of urgency that has contributed to the popularity of Kickstarter -- more projects get funded because of this. Obviously someone who put $10K as their amount might still be able to do their project with less, but that defeats the effectiveness of the site as a whole. The same can be said for the time limit, though it's a smaller issue.

> With those things in mind, today we’re lowering the maximum amount of time a creator can choose for their project from 90 days to 60 days.

Wet sidewalks cause rain. Film at 11.

In other news, banning anonymous article creation on Wikipedia has increased the acceptance rate of anonymous articles to 100%, a stunning increase in average quality.

What if they picked longer durations because they already knew their goal would be hard to reach?

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