Hard to believe but it is 6 months since Kickstarter began their UK operation. So we took the opportunity to have a look at the presence and performance of Scottish based projects on that platform during that period.
At the high level, there have been 47 projects, 32 of which have been successful and 15 of which were unsuccessful. This in itself is interesting as the success rate (68%) is running higher than the Kickstarter average which typically runs around 45 % success rate. These 47 projects sought £699,836 in total funding and the successful projects actually raised £697,592. Now the astute and numerically minded will quickly establish that this would average out at £21,800 per project which is of course arithmetically correct but it would be a little misleading and here’s why. Amongst the projects were two stand out projects that were disproportionately successful, and step well outside of a standard deviation and so distort the figures a little. So, with that in mind, if we look at the median value for projects we arrive at a typical project value of £1,461.
By city, Dundee is the most successful in that all 7 projects launched there were successful, but it is Edinburgh that has raised the most with some 21 successful projects from 28 raising £548,895
Projects in 11 categories were represented with Design, Film & Video, Games and Music each having 6 projects. Design being the most successful with all 6 projects being successful raising £121,088 in total.
Of the eye catching projects the greatest total was raised by RunRev in Edinburgh whose project to take the Livecode software open source raised £493,795 from 33442 backers. But in terms of over achieving their target the Omega Titanium Wallet project from Fireti in Aberdeen outstrips all others by starting off looking for £4800 and raising £103,899 – a 2164% success rate! Other notable over achievers include the Brew Test-Bot in Dundee who set out looking for £1,500 and managing £14,859 – 991% success.
All in all it demonstrates what is possible and so we can only wonder at what the future might hold.
Note: Our method for including projects was that a project must have begun after October 31st 2012 and completed before May 1st 2013. Projects needed to be located in Scotland (thereby excluding projects that, for example, intended to bring a production to the Edinburgh Festival but were, in fact, US based). Where projects were denominated in US Dollars we converted to Sterling at a rate of 1.6. In terms of categories we assigned all projects to the top level category available from the Kickstarter categories
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