The impression I get from their various press releases and comments is that Kickstarter is not really interested in the tech gizmo scene. They're kind of pushed it away by some of the rules they've added.
I'm also not sure they're making most of their money off of technology. Look at KS's 'Most Funded' page [1]. Sure, the projects about delivering A Tech Toy are generally making more. The Pebble's the only thing to break 10,000k. But scroll down a bit and the highest movie made 5,000k.
In fact, if you go look at the stats on their page summing up 2012[2], 'technology' is #5. Behind games, film/video, design, and music. What would happen if KS dropped the tech category? Hell, let's be aggressive and drop the game category too. All its big projects are pretty technical.
Games + tech pulled in $112,118k. People pledged $319,786k across all categories that year. So technology AND games pulled in about 1/3 of their pledges. Not too bad. But most of that was from games. Drop the gizmos, and they're only dropping $29,000k in pledges. (KS takes 5% of all pledges, so that's only about $1,450,000 out of $15,989k they'd be losing in terms of income.)
I think KS is doing the exact opposite of a pivot: the market found a use for their idea they didn't like, and instead of rebuilding things to make that easier, they're digging in their heels and insisting that it should only be used their way. Which is often a recipe for disaster, but not in the case of Kickstarter - it's clear there's a pretty good revenue stream solely in being the man in the middle of crowd-sourced art grants. Which is what they built the site to do.
As to whether or not they should be sending out smarter auto-generated mail based on what you've backed, whether or not they should let you build smart filters, I dunno. All I can say is that as a comics creator, KS worked damn fine for me as is, and I'm pretty confident it'll work equally well for the campaign I'm about to launch in a week or so.
Comments
The impression I get from their various press releases and comments is that Kickstarter is not really interested in the tech gizmo scene. They're kind of pushed it away by some of the rules they've added.
I'm also not sure they're making most of their money off of technology. Look at KS's 'Most Funded' page [1]. Sure, the projects about delivering A Tech Toy are generally making more. The Pebble's the only thing to break 10,000k. But scroll down a bit and the highest movie made 5,000k.
In fact, if you go look at the stats on their page summing up 2012[2], 'technology' is #5. Behind games, film/video, design, and music. What would happen if KS dropped the tech category? Hell, let's be aggressive and drop the game category too. All its big projects are pretty technical.
Games + tech pulled in $112,118k. People pledged $319,786k across all categories that year. So technology AND games pulled in about 1/3 of their pledges. Not too bad. But most of that was from games. Drop the gizmos, and they're only dropping $29,000k in pledges. (KS takes 5% of all pledges, so that's only about $1,450,000 out of $15,989k they'd be losing in terms of income.)
I think KS is doing the exact opposite of a pivot: the market found a use for their idea they didn't like, and instead of rebuilding things to make that easier, they're digging in their heels and insisting that it should only be used their way. Which is often a recipe for disaster, but not in the case of Kickstarter - it's clear there's a pretty good revenue stream solely in being the man in the middle of crowd-sourced art grants. Which is what they built the site to do.
As to whether or not they should be sending out smarter auto-generated mail based on what you've backed, whether or not they should let you build smart filters, I dunno. All I can say is that as a comics creator, KS worked damn fine for me as is, and I'm pretty confident it'll work equally well for the campaign I'm about to launch in a week or so.
1:http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/most-funded?ref=footer 2:http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#category 3:http://www.kickstarter.com/hello?ref=nav