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Crowdfunding Site Activity – From Olympians to Zombies

by Anthony J. Bradley  |  November 24, 2014  |  Submit a Comment

Because the crowd is the essence of Crowdfunding, in examining Crowdfunding sites I always look for indications of crowd activity. I was frequently unpleasantly surprised to find little evidence of a crowd. So much so, that I am now surprised when I do see solid crowd activity. And I’m not talking about advanced near real-time activity like how many contributors on-line now, money contributed so far today, number of projects invested in today, etc. I’m talking the absence of basic information on the size of the crowd and overall results such as “250 million dollars raised from 3 million people funding 10,000 projects.”   This lack of activity visibility is a sad statement and indicates that either the majority of crowdfunding marketplace sites don’t really understand the essence of Crowdfunding or their activity numbers are less than impressive. Either way this is very telling.

And so in the spirit of gamification, I have identified several categories of activity and have “tagged” each of the sites I’ve examined. My highly subjective categories are Olympian, Athlete, Active, Zombie and Corpse.

Corpse: No vital signs.

Zombie: Some movement but no real signs of life.

Active: Evidence of crowd participation is evident with basic signs of sustained health.

Athlete: The activity shows signs of high performance.

Olympian: Crowd activity is inspiring and sometimes awesome.

Here are the stats from my examination of 50+ sites. Remember that this is based on how they present themselves in their online experience. It indicates their promotion of activity but may not represent actual crowd activity. Performance is also relative to their target crowd.

Olympian = 6%

Athlete = 8%

Active = 22%

Zombie = 46%

Corpse = 14%

The Olympians are KickStarter.com, Lending Club and Prosper.

The Athletes are justgiving.com, RocketHub, youcaring.com and indiegogo.com.

Let me know if this kind of “Activity Analysis” is important to you and I can expand this coverage.

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Category: crowdfunding  

Anthony J. Bradley
GVP
10 years at Gartner
26 years in IT

Anthony J. Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research responsible for the research content that Gartner publishes through its three internet businesses (softwareadvice.com, capterra.com and getapp.com). These responsibilities include creating and leading the research organization and infrastructure needed for the strategy formulation, planning, research, creation, editing, production and distribution of the content. He has four global teams of highly talented people who are advancing towards the world's greatest destination for content on how small businesses succeed through information technology.




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