8 ms·

Benchmark of 100 crowdfunding videos reveals what works and how much to spend

165 points by tomsaffell 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
its4tom 10y ago
Author here! happy to answer questions, and curious to hear about your own crowdfunding video stories.
- vdnkh 10y ago
  Did you do any studies on any pure software products, such as a videogame?
  - its4tom 10y ago
    Only a few datapoints, but that's a good area to explore next. My hunch is that the findings will be quite different because there's a wider range of video formats for games. In particular much longer intros to set the stage.
- vpontis 10y ago
  Awesome article! It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you would affect your data.
  - its4tom 10y ago
    That's great to hear! We contaced many campaigns, and received answers from 100 of them. We are very grateful to the companies who shared their video info. This kind of transparency is much needed, in particular in video production. In terms of methodology, one third of the sample is from randomly selected campaigns on Kickstarter / Indiegogo, one third are campaigns that made videos with Videopixie creators (I am a co-founder), and the remainig third we targeted specifically to cover the full range of campaign sizes. Obviously we'd love to do this with even more campaigns. This was kind of a proof of concept for us. People seem to benefit from the data, and we have a methodology in place, so I hope we get to do more of it!
- vpontis 10y ago
  Awesome article! It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you would affect your data.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Did you have any thoughts regarding the attractiveness of the people in the videos? E.g. the video in another commenters post (the wooden remote) obviously hired models to appear in them.
conesus 10y ago
Ok, there's a chance I'll gain some valuable insight from posting this, which beats the cost of putting myself out there, so here goes... I just completed a 30 day hardware Kickstarter last week and spent $22k on the video ($18k for main video, $4k for founder interview) and raised $57k, which is an outlier to this data. I can tell my campaign is not in the Video Budget / Amount Raised graph because it would stick out near the bottom right. So it seems to me that something's not right. The product is compelling and I think it shows in the video. Much of the feedback I got for the video was positive. And there are a couple near competitors that have raised $1M+. My internal goal was to break $100k and that did not happen. Did I make a mistake with this video or campaign? I hit all of the points: early product intro, upbeat mood, 2:23, image quality, founder presence, location scouting and voice talent, and outside help. You can watch the video here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-beautiful-control https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-b...
- its4tom 10y ago
  I agree the video is well made. The quality is on par with what you'd expect for that budget. And it hits on all the recommendations we derived from the video benchmark data. Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?
  - conesus 10y ago
    The only ads I bought were about $2k of Facebook ads, which converted into about $1.6k of pledges. Not a winning strategy. I hired a couple people with experience in FB ads to help me with the audience, but the CTR of 3-4% at $0.25 CPC did not convert well. As for mailing list, I had 1,000 people signed up and I sent an email newsletter to 55k people who use my other service (which is compatible with this hardware), so it was relevant for them as well. Of the lessons learned, building up the mailing list is quite possibly the biggest. Just having ads running that you optimize for months beforehand is a good setup for running ads during the campaign itself.
- trendia 10y ago
sadface 10y ago
Interesting information! I really like the analysis of video content, particularly the "founder presence" info. However, I think that the headline results that isolate video cost when looking at raise results is a bit of an odd way to do this analysis because it leaves out the rest of the marketing mix. I'm actually preparing a crowdfunding campaign myself (first time), and I'd think that the main levers for success would be, in no order of importance: A: Pre-campaign support (solid email list, social media presence, etc), B: Video Quality, C: Rest of Page quality (ie: copy, visuals, etc), D: Paid advertising, E: Media Coverage, F: (Most important) Compelling product & pricepoint Money Raised should be a function of a-f (and several other factors I'm sure I'm missing) so isolating any one of those variables on its own is not that useful. Presumably a campaign with a $100k budget for its video has also made significant investments elsewhere. Something I'm still trying to figure out: assuming there is a limited budget, would one rather spend 20k on a video or 5k on the video + 15k more on Facebook ads? My thinking is that the 3M extra views (assuming $5 cpm) would be worth more than the marginal increase in video quality from $5k-$20k. Granted, if there's a good ROI on online ads, the budget there should theoretically be "unlimited", but that's not always the case. Curious about other peoples thoughts here.
- its4tom 10y ago
  Totally agree. I think that's what we are seeing from the other comments as well. Video is only part of the battle, and a more complete study would look at all the variables together. Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective, it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse frames from the video for the page. So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote more about this here https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video-cost https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video...
kingling 10y ago
I never saw the economics of crowdfunding before, but this confirms what I suspected: crowdfunding isn't really about getting your project funded by the crowd, but about buying a structured platform to launch from. It looks like a 10% non-refundable deposit is the entry ticket, plus a bunch of non-refundable marketing work on top. And you can't tell the truth about how much money you actually need for fear of not hitting your target. I'm not saying there's a problem here, but this isn't how I envisioned crowdfunding in the beginning. I thought it was a promising way for makers without money to get started. But it seems it's become a place for people with money to advertise and execute market analytics.
- tomcam 10y ago
  No argument here, but I can tell you that this kind of market research was absolutely impossible for such small sums in the pre-internet age.
arafa 10y ago
Many of the graphics here violate visual best practices, which can make them very misleading (the scatter plot in particular). The most egregious is the use of a log-scale on three of the graphics, which isn't highlighted at all. Humans don't compare and interpret log scales well (see The Elements of Graphing Data by Cleveland, etc.). I would've much rather seen percentages (say on return on investment) or break out the analysis into tiers that were more comparable.
maneesh 10y ago
Interesting. I've run two campaigns. The first we spent 5k on the video, and did 280k. The second campaign, we spent 2k on, and did 343k. I would say the video was negligible --- but the email list, marketing, product dev, and promos were far more important. As we prep for our third campaign, I'm thinking more about the video quality however. [1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits [2] http://indiegogo.com/projects/shock-clock-wakeup-trainer-never-hit-snooze-again--2/ http://indiegogo.com/projects/shock-clock-wakeup-trainer-nev...
Scirra_Tom 10y ago
Does anyone else feel that Kickstarter has turned from helping cash strapped startups and individuals raise funds for interesting projects into a low-risk small business pre-order system? I feel it's a shame people are spending $20,000+ to try and convince you to donate them money, I don't feel it was in the original spirit of Kickstarter earlier on.
- egypturnash 10y ago
  It still functions perfectly for smaller things too. For instance I spent today starting to get all my ducks in a row to fulfill a comics KS I raised $15k for. (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-rita-volume-3-and-omnibus https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-...)
- its4tom 10y ago
  The little guy can still succeed on Kickstarter/Indiegogo. We saw many bootstrapped campaigns do well (60% success rate), with videos made in-house or in the $1-$3k range. It's just that the amounts raised aren't as impressive, on average, $25k vs. the Millions attained by glossy campaigns with deeper pockets and expensive videos. Getting in the crowdfunding hall-of-fame has gotten harder, but crowdfunding is still an effective tool for small projects.
calchris42 10y ago
Can any causality be shown? I'd think there is likely a correlation between money spent on the promo video and the amount of resources, name recognition, e-mail lists, etc that a company already has prior to running the campaign.

165 points by tomsaffell 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

its4tom 10y ago

Author here! happy to answer questions, and curious to hear about your own crowdfunding video stories.

vdnkh 10y ago
Did you do any studies on any pure software products, such as a videogame?
- its4tom 10y ago
  Only a few datapoints, but that's a good area to explore next. My hunch is that the findings will be quite different because there's a wider range of video formats for games. In particular much longer intros to set the stage.
vpontis 10y ago
Awesome article! It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you would affect your data.
- its4tom 10y ago
  That's great to hear! We contaced many campaigns, and received answers from 100 of them. We are very grateful to the companies who shared their video info. This kind of transparency is much needed, in particular in video production. In terms of methodology, one third of the sample is from randomly selected campaigns on Kickstarter / Indiegogo, one third are campaigns that made videos with Videopixie creators (I am a co-founder), and the remainig third we targeted specifically to cover the full range of campaign sizes. Obviously we'd love to do this with even more campaigns. This was kind of a proof of concept for us. People seem to benefit from the data, and we have a methodology in place, so I hope we get to do more of it!
vpontis 10y ago
Awesome article! It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you would affect your data.
wingerlang 10y ago
Did you have any thoughts regarding the attractiveness of the people in the videos? E.g. the video in another commenters post (the wooden remote) obviously hired models to appear in them.

conesus 10y ago

Ok, there's a chance I'll gain some valuable insight from posting this, which beats the cost of putting myself out there, so here goes... I just completed a 30 day hardware Kickstarter last week and spent $22k on the video ($18k for main video, $4k for founder interview) and raised $57k, which is an outlier to this data. I can tell my campaign is not in the Video Budget / Amount Raised graph because it would stick out near the bottom right. So it seems to me that something's not right. The product is compelling and I think it shows in the video. Much of the feedback I got for the video was positive. And there are a couple near competitors that have raised $1M+. My internal goal was to break $100k and that did not happen. Did I make a mistake with this video or campaign? I hit all of the points: early product intro, upbeat mood, 2:23, image quality, founder presence, location scouting and voice talent, and outside help. You can watch the video here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-beautiful-control https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-b...

its4tom 10y ago
I agree the video is well made. The quality is on par with what you'd expect for that budget. And it hits on all the recommendations we derived from the video benchmark data. Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?
- conesus 10y ago
  The only ads I bought were about $2k of Facebook ads, which converted into about $1.6k of pledges. Not a winning strategy. I hired a couple people with experience in FB ads to help me with the audience, but the CTR of 3-4% at $0.25 CPC did not convert well. As for mailing list, I had 1,000 people signed up and I sent an email newsletter to 55k people who use my other service (which is compatible with this hardware), so it was relevant for them as well. Of the lessons learned, building up the mailing list is quite possibly the biggest. Just having ads running that you optimize for months beforehand is a good setup for running ads during the campaign itself.
trendia 10y ago

sadface 10y ago

Interesting information! I really like the analysis of video content, particularly the "founder presence" info. However, I think that the headline results that isolate video cost when looking at raise results is a bit of an odd way to do this analysis because it leaves out the rest of the marketing mix. I'm actually preparing a crowdfunding campaign myself (first time), and I'd think that the main levers for success would be, in no order of importance: A: Pre-campaign support (solid email list, social media presence, etc), B: Video Quality, C: Rest of Page quality (ie: copy, visuals, etc), D: Paid advertising, E: Media Coverage, F: (Most important) Compelling product & pricepoint Money Raised should be a function of a-f (and several other factors I'm sure I'm missing) so isolating any one of those variables on its own is not that useful. Presumably a campaign with a $100k budget for its video has also made significant investments elsewhere. Something I'm still trying to figure out: assuming there is a limited budget, would one rather spend 20k on a video or 5k on the video + 15k more on Facebook ads? My thinking is that the 3M extra views (assuming $5 cpm) would be worth more than the marginal increase in video quality from $5k-$20k. Granted, if there's a good ROI on online ads, the budget there should theoretically be "unlimited", but that's not always the case. Curious about other peoples thoughts here.

its4tom 10y ago
Totally agree. I think that's what we are seeing from the other comments as well. Video is only part of the battle, and a more complete study would look at all the variables together. Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective, it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse frames from the video for the page. So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote more about this here https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video-cost https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video...

kingling 10y ago

I never saw the economics of crowdfunding before, but this confirms what I suspected: crowdfunding isn't really about getting your project funded by the crowd, but about buying a structured platform to launch from. It looks like a 10% non-refundable deposit is the entry ticket, plus a bunch of non-refundable marketing work on top. And you can't tell the truth about how much money you actually need for fear of not hitting your target. I'm not saying there's a problem here, but this isn't how I envisioned crowdfunding in the beginning. I thought it was a promising way for makers without money to get started. But it seems it's become a place for people with money to advertise and execute market analytics.

tomcam 10y ago
No argument here, but I can tell you that this kind of market research was absolutely impossible for such small sums in the pre-internet age.

arafa 10y ago

Many of the graphics here violate visual best practices, which can make them very misleading (the scatter plot in particular). The most egregious is the use of a log-scale on three of the graphics, which isn't highlighted at all. Humans don't compare and interpret log scales well (see The Elements of Graphing Data by Cleveland, etc.). I would've much rather seen percentages (say on return on investment) or break out the analysis into tiers that were more comparable.

maneesh 10y ago

Interesting. I've run two campaigns. The first we spent 5k on the video, and did 280k. The second campaign, we spent 2k on, and did 343k. I would say the video was negligible --- but the email list, marketing, product dev, and promos were far more important. As we prep for our third campaign, I'm thinking more about the video quality however. [1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits [2] http://indiegogo.com/projects/shock-clock-wakeup-trainer-never-hit-snooze-again--2/ http://indiegogo.com/projects/shock-clock-wakeup-trainer-nev...

Scirra_Tom 10y ago

Does anyone else feel that Kickstarter has turned from helping cash strapped startups and individuals raise funds for interesting projects into a low-risk small business pre-order system? I feel it's a shame people are spending $20,000+ to try and convince you to donate them money, I don't feel it was in the original spirit of Kickstarter earlier on.

egypturnash 10y ago
It still functions perfectly for smaller things too. For instance I spent today starting to get all my ducks in a row to fulfill a comics KS I raised $15k for. (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-rita-volume-3-and-omnibus https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-...)
its4tom 10y ago
The little guy can still succeed on Kickstarter/Indiegogo. We saw many bootstrapped campaigns do well (60% success rate), with videos made in-house or in the $1-$3k range. It's just that the amounts raised aren't as impressive, on average, $25k vs. the Millions attained by glossy campaigns with deeper pockets and expensive videos. Getting in the crowdfunding hall-of-fame has gotten harder, but crowdfunding is still an effective tool for small projects.

calchris42 10y ago

Can any causality be shown? I'd think there is likely a correlation between money spent on the promo video and the amount of resources, name recognition, e-mail lists, etc that a company already has prior to running the campaign.