Kickstarter post portem

Kickstarter is alive and well; social media... not so much

Using a term like "post-mortem" for my recent Kickstarter is a little inappropriate. Kickstarter is still very much alive and well. In fact, it's thriving. But there is a death to report: Social media. I'll share some real numbers and analytics from my campaign and talk about what I think it means for the new age of webcomics we're moving into.

Referral tags

When you launch a Kickstarter, you can set up a special hyperlink to your campaign that is tagged with the place you're planning to use it. For example, you can set up a special "referral tag" for Twitter, and then every time you tweet, you can use this special link. Kickstarter's analytics will subsequently keep track of the results yielded by this referral tag, allowing you to track the effectiveness of those tweets.

Kickstarter tracks its own systems for delivering pledges, including its funnels for discovery, search, category listings, and so forth. And that's where the numbers get fascinating. Over half of the money my campaign generated was delivered through Kickstarter itself!

Custom referrers

Here's a look at the results of all of my promotions. Each of these categories is the result of a referral tag. You can see that posting to my Patreon backers was the best method of generating pledges. The second-best method was posting an update on the page of an earlier Kickstarter. In fact, every time you see an entry that begins with "Update," you're seeing the results of an update that I posted on a previous Kickstarter campaign. Pay careful attention to the top ten referrers.