Kickstarter campaigns raise 6x more than Indiegogo, says researcher

Updated 8:00pm Pacific with comment from Indiegogo.

Whenever crowdfunding websites are compared, you can generally expect to see Kickstarter and Indiegogo in the same sentence. But one freelancer has discovered just how much better Kickstarter seems to be doing than its competition.

Jonathan Lau wrote a scraper to look at the crowdfunding sites’ amount of campaigns, failed campaigns, money raised, and other tidbits. Compared side by side, Kickstarter has raised over six times as much money for its campaigns than Indiegogo, he writes. That’s despite the fact that Indiegogo provides a “flexible funding” program where projects that don’t meet their funding goal can still keep pledges in exchange for paying a higher fee.

When it comes to campaigns, Kickstarter has Indiegogo beat in numbers as well. Kickstarter has over 110,000 campaigns, whereas Indiegogo only has 44,000 — though, Lau points out that Indiegogo does removed some failed campaigns from its listings.

An Indiegogo spokesman responded with a categorical denial of Lau’s data.

“Each alleged Indiegogo statistic in the post that you refer to is inaccurate,” said the spokesperson.

When asked for specific corrections, the spokesperson refused.

“Indiegogo as a general policy does not discuss competitive, proprietary data. It never has,” he said.

Lau’s data lists thousands of public Indiegogo projects by URL, dollar amount raised, percent of target reached, and number of days left in the campaign. A VentureBeat spot check showed that the data appears to match what is published on Indiegogo.

It looks like Indiegogo only has around 7.5 percent as many campaigns hit the million dollar mark than Kickstarter: Just three, versus Kickstarter’s 40, according to Lau. Indiegogo’s own “most funded” page lists 7 campaigns over the million-dollar mark, including the impressively big, failed campaign for the Ubuntu Edge.

Overall, Kickstarter has raised $612 million for its campaigns, whereas Indiegogo has raised $98 million, according to Lau’s research.

“Widely considered the number two crowdfunding site based on volume, it is shocking to see that Indiegogo is so massively behind Kickstarter,” said Lau in his post on Medium. “It looks to us that Kickstarter has cornered the most lucrative part of the crowdfunding market, leaving competitors like Indiegogo to fight for the scraps in far poorer niches.”

Lau has also provided the raw data for anyone to chew through.