Are there any trends among successful Kickstarter projects? Conversely, are there any trends for failed projects?
Time Lapse Video of the Design:

I was personally interested in digging into this data because I almost started a Kickstarted project myself (for a video game I am currently developing - if you are interested, you can check out the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/AntaresStudioGames/).
At any rate, I thought of the following questions that I wanted to find the answers to:
1. What category is most successful?
We can see that the "Dance" category is most successful. For this metric, I removed any categories that had less than 1000 projects (because there may have been a category with only one (successful) project, thus giving it a 100% success rate).

2. What goal amount is most successful?

A goal amount of 0-5K is most successful. Indeed, most projects fall within this category, but this is not the reason for the higher success rate. The reason is simply because getting a smaller amount is easier. This answer was fairly intuitive.
3. What time period (in days) is most successful?
All projects fall within 3 months. Although 0-30 days has the highest success rate, there isn't much variation among other periods (33.7% to 36.8%).

4. What is the average number of backers for successful projects?
The average number of backers (people that pledged any amount of money), turns out to be 264 people.
5. What is the average goal for failed projects, and how far off were they from being completed?
The average goal of failed projects (any project that wasn't classified as "live" or "successful"), is about 70.5K. These same projects were quite far off from their goal, raising on average only about 1.6K.
6. What is the average time period for failed projects?
The average period for failed projects is 35 days.
7. Is there any month in which projects are more successful?
There isn't much difference, but overall, projects started in April tend to have a higher success rate. On the other hand, January and August seem to be the worst month to begin a project among all categories.

Video Game Stats
Since I'm mostly interested in the video games side of things, let's take a look at that... I found that only 20% of video game projects are successfully completed. Projects with a period of 62-92 days have about a 11% higher rate of success than those under one month. 0-5K still yields the highest successful projects, and January is the worst month to begin a video game project (May being the best).

Are you thinking about taking on a Kickstarter project? I wish all the luck to you in your endeavors! And I hope this analysis provided some useful insight for you.
Cheers!
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