The number of people who pledged money to support Kickstarter projects increased steadily between 2014 and 2025. As of August 2025, more than 24.47 million people had pledged their monetary support towards any of the over 650,000 projects launched on Kickstarter (successfully completed or not). In addition, over eight million people had backed more than one project on the crowdfunding site.

Launched on April 28, 2009, Kickstarter is a Public Benefit Corporation based in Brooklyn, New York. It is a global crowdfunding platform that helps to fund new creative projects and ideas through direct support from individuals (backers) from around the world who pledge money to bring these projects and ideas to life. Kickstarter supports many different kinds of projects. Everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Funding on Kickstarter is based on the all-or-nothing model. Backers who pledge their support towards a particular project won't be charged unless the funding goal has been reached. Successfully funded projects reward their backers with one-of-a-kind experiences, e.g., limited editions, or copies of the creative work being produced. This study includes three datasets: (1) Kickstarter Project (public-use file), (2) Backer Location file, and (3) Kickstarter Project (restricted-use file). The public-use Kickstarter Project dataset contains detailed information about all successful and unsuccessful Kickstarter projects (N=610,015) from 2009-2023, including the project category and subcategory, project location (city, state (for U.S.-based projects), and country), funding goal in original and U.S. currencies, amount pledged in dollars, and the number of backers for each project. The restricted file adds the project title, 150-character project description, and the URL for the project on the Kickstarter site. The Backer Location dataset includes information about backers' country and state and the total amount pledged for each geographic location.

As of January 2025, the success rate of fully funding a project on Kickstarter stood at ***** percent. This means that more than four out of ten projects on the platform achieved their funding goals, while less than six out of ten fell short of securing the necessary backing. More about Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American-based crowdfunding platform that was created in 2009 and has reportedly received pledges worth over *** billion U.S. dollars as of January 2025. The company focuses on creative projects and functions on a reward-based system, where backers of a project are promised a little something in return for their financial contribution, such as personalized merchandise, invitations to events, public acknowledgement or updates regarding the project’s development. Kickstarter also applies one of two types of reward-based crowdfunding, namely 'All-or-Nothing' support, where project initiators set a funding goal and receive the donations only if the goal is reached, as opposed to 'Keep-it-All,' the funding model used by other platforms, where the money raised is kept regardless of whether it meets the funding goal. Which are Kickstarter's most popular projects? As of January 2025, the most popular category of projects featured on Kickstarter was games, with roughly **** billion U.S. dollars pledged. Design projects were the second most funded, followed by technology and film and video. One of the most funded games in early 2025 was Exploding Kittens, a card game designed by Elan Lee, Shane Small and comic creator Matthew Inman. Their initial funding goal was only 10,000 U.S. dollars, which was reached within eight minutes. Exploding Kittens received over *** million U.S. dollars in pledges from more than ******** backers in less than a month, making it one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time.

As of January 2025, more than 651,000 projects had been launched worldwide on the American crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Of these, 41.98 percent were successfully funded, meaning over four out of ten reached their funding goals. The total amount pledged across all projects surpassed 8.5 billion U.S. dollars, with approximately 7.86 billion U.S. dollars representing successfully funded contributions.

We'll customize a Kickstarter dataset to align with your unique requirements, incorporating public data on campaign titles, creator names, categories, launch dates, funding goals, amounts raised, backer counts, and other relevant metrics.

Leverage our Kickstarter datasets for various applications to strengthen strategic planning and market analysis. Examining these datasets enables organizations to understand backer preferences and crowdfunding trends, facilitating refined campaign offerings and optimized marketing strategies. Tailor your access to the complete dataset or specific subsets according to your business needs.

Popular use cases include optimizing campaign selections based on backer insights, refining marketing strategies through targeted backer segmentation, and identifying and predicting trends to maintain a competitive edge in the crowdfunding market.

At the end of August 2014, the Coolest Cooler finished its Kickstarter campaign with more than ***** million U.S. dollars in project funding. Until then, the Pebble e-paper watch had held the title for the highest-funded project on the crowdfunding website, with ***** million U.S. dollars. In March 2015, Pebble's second smartwatch project completed its crowdfunding and publicity run with ***** million dollars raised in Kickstarter pre-order funding, becoming the most successful Kickstarter project as of July 2021. However, in 2022, the crowdfunding project Surprise! Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson raised nearly ** million U.S. dollars - more than twice as much as Pebble Time - making it the most funded Kickstarter project up until July 2025. It was dethroned by eufyMake E1: the First Personal 3D-Texture UV printer, which pledged a total of ***** billion U.S. dollars. Kickstarter and crowdfunding Founded in 2009, Kickstarter has become one of the most prolific crowdfunding platforms worldwide. The site enables creators to generate funding for their projects, bypassing traditional avenues of investment and opening the market for niche productions. Each project has a deadline, and if the pre-set funding goal is not met, no funds are collected. Until October 2012, the website required projects to be based in the United States, before expanding to the United Kingdom and later Canada in September 2013. Project backers do not have to reside in the United States. Most popular categories Kickstarter offers a diverse range of project categories, enticing creative ventures from all walks of life. With an approximate success rate of ** percent, the platform empowers innovators to transform their dreams into reality. Among these categories, games reign supreme as the most popular, with more than *** billion U.S. dollars pledged in 2024. Design and technology were also among the more popular categories on the platform.

The Kickstarter Campaigns Dataset 2.0 is the new version of the older Kickstarter Campaigns dataset (https://www.kaggle.com/yashkantharia/kickstarter-campaigns). I've added some new columns and updated the dataset, I am publishing this as another dataset.

This dataset contains Kickstarter's web scraping data from webrobots.io (https://webrobots.io/kickstarter-datasets/) which was combined, pre-processed, and created into a simple and easy to understand Dataset, containing various attributes about Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns. The dataset includes projects from 2014 to 2020.

This data set can be used to create a model for a Kickstarter Campaign Success Prediction.

All the currency values are converted into appropriate amounts in USD as per the fx rate provided in the base dataset.

Acknowledgments

Data collected from webrobotos.io which provides web scraping services.

Inspiration

Dataset was created in order to create a model for the Kickstarter campaign success predictor.

Kickstarter has become a powerhouse in the crowdfunding world, with pledges surpassing **** billion U.S. dollars by August 2025. This milestone reflects the platform's growing influence in project funding since its inception in 2009. The platform's most successful campaign to date, eufyMakeE1: the First personal 3D-Texture UV Printer, raised an astounding ***** million U.S. dollars in 2025, showcasing the potential for creators to secure substantial backing. Project success and challenges While Kickstarter has facilitated numerous successful campaigns, not all projects achieve their funding goals. As of January 2025, the platform had hosted over ******* projects, with a success rate of ***** percent. This means that more than four out of ten projects reached their funding targets. However, a significant number of campaigns fall short, with ******* projects failing to meet their goals. The majority of these unsuccessful projects achieved only 1-20 percent of their funding objectives, highlighting the challenges creators face in securing financial support. Category performance and backer engagement Success rates on Kickstarter vary significantly across project categories. As of January 2025, comics led with a ***** percent success rate, followed by dance at ***** percent and theater at ***** percent. These figures suggest that certain creative fields resonate more strongly with Kickstarter's backer community. The platform's growth is further evidenced by the increasing number of backers, with over **** million people pledging support to projects by January 2025. Notably, more than ***** million individuals have backed multiple projects, demonstrating a high level of repeat engagement on the platform.

Context

As a project manager and a keen data scientist, I was always curious about the factors of a successful project. When I was a student in New York City Data Science Academy, I finally had the chance to do a research in this field.

Content

The contents of this CSV file is an output of a Web Scraping project which was completed in May 2019 at NYCDSA. Since Kickstarter hides almost all of the completed projects from its website and search engine, I first scraped another website called Kicktraq which keeps track of all completed projects on Kickstarter. Then, I followed the link on Kicktraq which references to the project's original Kickstarter page. Kickstarter page provides some additional information regarding the pledge tiers, backers for each pledge tiers, full project description, number of comments, updates, FAQs etc. I finally combined all variables from both Kicktraq and Kickstarter for 8028 projects in one file.

Inspiration

Using this dataset, below research questions can be investigated:

1. What is the success/failure ratio for each U.S. State?
2. What are the factors of a successful project?
3. Is there a linear relationship between the variables?
4. What kind of statistical model best describes the dataset?
5. Given the variables. can you predict if a project will be successful?

Problem Statement

Kickstarter is a community of more than 10 million people comprising of creative, tech enthusiasts who help in bringing creative project to life. Till now, more than $3 billion dollars have been contributed by the members in fueling creative projects. The projects can be literally anything – a device, a game, an app, a film etc.

Kickstarter works on all or nothing basis i.e if a project doesn’t meet it goal, the project owner gets nothing. For example: if a projects’s goal is $500. Even if it gets funded till $499, the project won’t be a success.

Recently, Kickstarter released its public data repository to allow researchers and enthusiasts like us to help them solve a problem. Will a project get fully funded ?

In this challenge, you have to predict if a project will get successfully funded or not.

Data Description

There are three files given to download: train.csv, test.csv and sample_submission.csv The train data consists of sample projects from the May 2009 to May 2015. The test data consists of projects from June 2015 to March 2017.

As of January 2025, the games category was the most successful on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in terms of funded projects. Over ****** projects in this category achieved their funding goals. Following closely, the music category saw over ****** successfully funded projects. In contrast, the journalism category had just ***** successful projects, making it the least funded category on the platform.

As of January 2025, most successfully funded Kickstarter projects raised between 1,000 and 9,999 U.S. dollars, with over 143,000 projects falling into this funding range. Projects that secured significantly higher amounts were much rarer: 11,866 projects raised between 100,000 and 999,999 U.S. dollars, while fewer than 1,000 projects achieved funding of one million U.S. dollars or more.

Webscraped data combined with manual coding for a publication.

Traffic analytics, rankings, and competitive metrics for kickstarter.com as of August 2025

Summary statistics of identified edits.

Kickstarter, the popular crowdfunding platform, has seen a significant number of projects fall short of their funding goals. As of January 2025, 376,698 projects failed to reach their targets, with the majority (246,351) achieving only 1-20 percent of their funding objectives. This failure rate underscores the challenges creators face in securing financial backing for their ideas, despite Kickstarter's global reach and billions in pledged funds. Crowdfunding's growing impact Since its launch in 2009, Kickstarter has become a major player in the crowdfunding industry. The number of projects hosted on the platform exceeded 651,000 projects, with pledges surpassing 8.5 billion U.S. dollars. Notably, the most successful project to date, "Surpise! Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson", raised an impressive 41 million U.S. dollars in 2022. These figures highlight the platform's potential for creators to secure substantial funding for their projects. Success rates vary by category While many projects struggle to meet their funding goals, success rates differ significantly across categories. As of January 2025, comics boasted the highest success rate at 67.65 percent, followed by dance at 61.11 percent and theater at 59.72 percent. These statistics suggest that certain creative fields may resonate more strongly with Kickstarter's backer community, potentially offering better odds for project success in these areas.

4941 Global import shipment records of Kickstarter with prices, volume & current Buyer's suppliers relationships based on actual Global export trade database.

A spreadsheet that tracks changes in Kickstarter's Guidelines, Rules, Prohibited Items and Terms and Conditions, over time. Please note that the rows for 3 December 2010 and 17 July 2019 are reliable. All other rows should be checked for completeness. I created this data because I was interested in seeing how much Kickstarter had changed their rules around campaigns and rewards since launching. 3 December 2010 was the first archived version that I could find that didn't contain the words 'Beta' or 'by invitation'. 17 July 2019 was the date of collection of the data. This was collected as part of a chapter about legal risk in crowdfunding.

Summary statistics of non-censored word count.

As of January 2025, games emerged as the most-funded project category on Kickstarter, attracting **** billion U.S. dollars in backer pledges. In contrast, dance represented the least-funded category, garnering only ***** million U.S. dollars. Technology ranked third, raising a total of **** billion U.S. dollars in pledges.