Crowdfunding can be a great way to gain capital for your project or idea. Among the most popular crowdfunding platforms, there are specific categories that perform well and some that don’t. In this article, we are going to look at the success of both Kickstarter and Indiegogo’s categories in the past years up to 2022.
Most platforms have specific types of campaigns that they are hosting. Typically, each campaign needs to be listed under a particular category. This helps backers understand what the campaign is offering as well as navigate the platform. Let’s take deeper dive into some of the most popular crowdfunding platforms today and what categories they offer.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is one of the most influential crowdfunding platforms. They are the first mainstream platform to hit the market and offer a solution for those that want to run a rewards/donations based platform, with a unique offering to raise funds via All or Nothing mode.
Within the Kickstarter ecosystem, you can see that there are specific categories that Kickstarter supports. These categories include Games, Design, Technology, Film, and more.
Here, you can see each category and how much they have raised (all time) and is updated daily here.
As you can see, games are the highest funded category on Kickstarter, but that does not mean they have the highest success rate. If you are looking to find/buy good board games, Kickstarter would be a platform that you want to visit. There are already lots of visitors who are visiting Kickstarter to purchase games. It’s best to aim for a category with the best ratio of high success rate and the amount funded.
Indiegogo
For Indiegogo, it’s not as easy to find stats compared to Kickstarter. They don’t have a page dedicated to the stats about the different categories. Here are the top Successful campaigns on Indiegogo per category (the 1st semester of 2021).
- Home
- Transportation
- Fashion and wearables
You can find more information by reading this article here.
Indiegogo has a higher focus on physical products, whereas Kickstarter provides a platform for the creative types. Indiegogo is focused on helping entrepreneurs with their business, and Kickstarter can help creatives sell or gain funding for their creative masterpiece. You can find products that are going to help your lifestyle on Indiegogo, and you can find interesting creative works, such as music, film, or games on Kickstarter.
Understanding the categories
You can see that each platform has a specific demographic that they are targeting. This means that you will find better success for your particular campaign, depending on what type of platform you are using.
It is best to research which categories perform the best for the platform when choosing where to host the campaign. Some campaigns can perform better due to the demographic since they are interested in that specific category already. The only reason you would want to use a crowdfunding platform to host a campaign is because of the potential backers that they will provide.
The stats for each of these categories can also help with understanding what rewards/donations based crowdfunding can be best utilized for. Although you can crowdfund for almost any scenario, would you really want to based on the category that your campaign would be listed in? That can help guide you to what will be most useful with your time.
Alternative options
If there’s not a specific category that you can use on a platform, another option to explore is building a self-hosted crowdfunding campaign. You can have your campaign hosted on any new or existing website of your choice. All that you need to do is copy/paste a small snippet of HTML code onto the page. This may be the best option if there is no category for your specific campaign on any of the platforms that you are using, after all, you are looking to gain backers from that platform.