What is the most successful category on Kickstarter?

The answer may surprise you. There have been a number of big stories to come out of Kickstarter over the past couple years. Usually those fall in two categories, movies and tech. Even if you don’t use the service, chances are you heard about the Veronica Mars or Pebble projects. But those are both really outliers. The reality is that Film & Video projects succeed at a rate of 39.87%, while Technology runs at 34.56%. The leader has a success rate of 71.27%, and it’s dance.

Part of that will come down to the fact that the dance projects do have a lower average goal of $4,270. Clearly, that bar is going to be easier to clear than the $75,000 of the technology category. But the numbers don’t entirely track that way. Art, for example, has an average goal of $5,100, but a success rate of just 48.9%. And photography, at $7,220 average is just 36.54%. Clearly there is something about dance and its audience that is making it such a success on kickstarter. sfgate.com has a great breakdown with even more numbers. It’s well worth a look.

And that picture at the top? That is from Spaghetti Co, a dance project that I backed on Kickstarter.