Visualization of where the $1B on Kickstarter went | Hacker News Reader

Visualization of where the $1B on Kickstarter went

blog.milesgrimshaw.com

79 pointsmilesgrimshaw35 comments

Maps of the creator's behind all the Kickstarter projects

The problem with heat maps, like this one, is they end up effectively as maps of population density. To make a heat map informative, consider coloring the map zones proportionately to the population in that area.

Of course there is a relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1138/

Not entirely true in this case. If it were then you'd expect to see more in Europe and Asia than this map shows. In the US it does devolve to a population density map.

You're using baked-in world population distribution information exactly to make that statement.

"The data set I scraped shows $957,512,698 total pledged (I am missing a few campaigns that threw errors when scraping) across 131,348 total campaigns."

Thats an impressive amount of scraping. I wonder if kickstarter noticed. Probably not given their volume of traffic must be quite large.

I would love to play with this data set. Is it available?

Can email me (username) at gmail

Dump it into archive.org please

Well, clearly it is.

This is not where the money came from, but where it went, right? So how come there are so many countries? Isn't Kickstarter working only in a handful of countries (basically wherever Amazon is)? But I see a lot of other places, too.

Why are you mentioning Amazon?

Kickstarter accepts money via Amazon Payments for projects based in the US.

Cause Kickstarter uses Amazon to process payments.

> Meanwhile, project creation is currently available to individuals in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand who meet the requirements below.

How do people outside of these create campaigns?

You can list "Project Location" as anywhere.

The funding target (individual or entity) has to be in US/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ. Basically your bank account has to have a US billing address, you as project creator can live anywhere. You can do this by having an account in the US, or commonly having a "middle-man" who is (usually) part of your project team who is receiving the funds.

The reason for this is that these are the only countries where Kickstarter is authorized to legally disburse funds to individuals or companies. They send out possibly large amounts of money, so they need to make sure they close all the legal ends. You can get a clue of how complicated it is for them looking at their Payments FAQ, where they have a separate one for each country they're allowing creators to operate from:

https://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/creator+questions?ref=f...

They need to jump a bunch of legal hurdles anywhere or risk getting in trouble, being prevented from holding up their end of the deal, pay a large fine, get bad press/rep, etc. It's more complicated than just being authorized to do business in the country.

Through a middle-man able to transfer the money to wherever the company is actually located.

Doesn't that mean that the campaign will be flagged as being where the middle-man is?

It looks like you can still put down your own location. I know some of these people, whose Kickstarter lists them as being in Copenhagen: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2128128298/expeditions-...

I believe in their case they used a U.S.-based publisher or agent to handle the funds (not sure of the exact arrangement), since Denmark isn't in the list of locations Kickstarter supports. But seems like KS still let them put down Copenhagen as the company location.

It seems Kickstarter is making it increasingly difficult to start a campaign outside of those countries and obviously using a middle man.

Does anyone know for what reason(s) campaigns are limited to these countries?

Payment processor country-limited service areas.

Move.

I wonder what was the successful Kickstarer project from Pyongyang, Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

You did not wonder quite enough to google it?

https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/places/pyongyang-kp?ref...

So, basically, none of these things were really from Pyongyang, just somehow related to it?

Yeah, the data seems a bit messy. Of the three projects listed as "from" Pyongyang and successfully funded, all three appear to actually be U.S.-based people/groups. Two of them hope to use the Kickstarter money to travel to North Korea, while one of them plans to write about North Korea from NYC.

If it's possible to extract the data, I would probably use the location of the person running each project (listed under their name in the right sidebar), rather than whatever location they've tagged the project with. But this might not matter a lot; they seem to usually be the same location.

Nice. It would be interesting to see more visualizations or summary statistics that show what type of phrases, topics, or other features of a Kickstarter campaign make it most likely to get funded.

I would also be curious on the failed kickstarters as well. Perhaps show the success as green, in progress as yellow, and failed as red.

We all can learn how the failures fail. It is HN.

Why does the UK have so much more than the rest of Europe? Is this becuase they speak english or do they have more of an entrepreneurial attitude than everyone else?

UK is the only European country currently where "you can create a kickstarter project", ie, where you can have a local bank account and receive Kickstarter funds. Any other European country needs a US/UK (or other valid country) bank account (themselves or a "middle man") to receive their funding.

Which creators have this option is obviously the main factor influencing where creators are from in Europe.

It's interesting to see the step change when Kickstarter launched in the UK in October 2012

How'd you like working with CartoDB?

Really simple to use. Just uploaded a CSV into the platform for this, set the GEOM from lat/lon I had already configured in columns, and changed the date string into a SQL Data, then simple click interface for creating each visualization. All told took no more than 5 mins for each visualization.

Nice. You're on a pay plan? Which one? I assume you got a lot of traffic from HN.

Nice visualization, btw. It actually shows something, unlike a lot of vizzes.

Can you make one of those for MtGox?

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