The webcomics blog about webcomics

Time!

It too a little longer than the 18 – 20 hours that my original projections indicated but the Homestuck Kickstarter campaign just rolled over its goal of US$700,000 in approximately 32 hours, 6 minutes. There was a sprint there as quite a bit of money came in a quick burst, as (I suspect) people tried to be the one to put the whole thing over the top.

The numbers:

  • Backers: 7701
  • Total raised: $700,049
  • Dollars per backer: $90.95
  • Dollars per hour: $21,819.60

Just as interesting were the breakdowns in the support levels:

  • $15 and up: 2118
  • $25 and up: 1693
  • $55 and up: 794
  • $80 and up: 280
  • $105 and up (unlimited): 579
  • $105 and up (limited reward #1): 671 of 1000
  • $105 and up (limited reward #2): 132 of 1000
  • $180 and up: 84
  • $255 and up (unlimited): 141
  • $255 and up (limited reward): 600 of 600
  • $405 and up (limited reward): 458 of 1000
  • $5000 and up (limited reward): 3 of 25
  • $10,000 and up (limited reward): 0 of 10
  • No reports of God Tier rewards 2 ($100K) through 6 ($1B) yet

Interestingly, if you add up those numbers, it comes to 7553 (if I’ve got my sums right), which means 148 people have donated less than $15, with no hopes of tangible reward — they just want to see the project succeed.

Regarding the bits in bold, this campaign is completely screwing with my earlier analysis of successful webcomics Kickstarts, which said that the high-dollar values aren’t going to make up a significant number of backers. Here, Andrew Hussie has 1202 people (15.6% of his total backers) ponying up at least $250 each¹, accounting for a total of $389,445 (55.6% of total money raised), giving me a big enough outlier that all my prior conclusions now have to have a footnote attached².

Oh, and in the time it’s taken me to type this up, it’s up to 7890 backers and $714,964. That’s going to lead to a non-stop cycle of not being able to type numbers in quickly enough to keep up, so do your own calculations from there.

One last note: the trending predictions at Kicktraq only get graphed once per day, so while today’s point is going to be down from yesterday’s by several million dollars, that graph isn’t going to show the changes in trend that took place during today. When I first checked Kicktraq this morning, Homestuck was trending toward US$8.3 million; by the time of meeting goal, it was up to more than US$10 million.

As I write this (and Kicktraq only recalculates once per hour, so this is for 11:01pm EDT), it’s up to US$11.1 million. I have not ever seen a Kicktraq trend go up that much in the early part of a campaign, when there tends to be a huge dropoff. Even in the frenzy of the last days of an exciting campaign, trend delta tends to be downwards, flat, or very slightly up; a 33% uptick in the course of a day is (once again) Not Something That Happens. We’re officially into uncharted territory. It’s going to take the combined math skills of Randall Munroe and Zach Weinersmith to make sense of this one.
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¹ I’m pretty sure the 458 people at $405 is unprecedented.

² Namely, All predictions are moot if your name is Andrew Hussie, but it probably isn’t.

I’m pretty sure the dominance at the $255 and $405 levels can be attributed almost solely to the Scalemate Effect. So it’s not so much ‘predictions are moot if you’re Andrew’, but perhaps ‘predictions may change if you offer people fuzzy dragons’.

[…] Gary has an interesting detailed break down of the number of backers, the amounts. […]

Know what I call that? “Getting paid to find out what I can sell to people.”

The real surprise is just how bleeping loaded Homestuck fans have to be to afford those high-level rewards.

The 148 people who aren’t counted in the reward levels could have also pledged more than $15 but didn’t pick a reward for some reason.

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