What is the best time of year to launch a Kickstarter?

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What is the best time of year to launch a Kickstarter?

What’s the worst time of year to Launch a Kickstarter?

If you’d done your work, drawn your pages, gathered your rewards together, then you’ve earned the right to launch your Kickstarter. But does timing matter?

I’ve launched three successful Kickstarter campaigns and monitored many others in the name of obsessive research. I used to play video games when I was bored, now I watch and analyze KS campaigns. Because of timing issues I was forced to launch one of my campaigns during the holiday season around late December. Many people said it was going to fail, that no one had any money during the lean winter months. Well I have found that to be absolutely not true. But that doesn’t mean you should have your campaign end on Christmas day! That

time of year is bad for a different reason. You should ask yourself, how much time did you spend on the computer on Christmas day. And aside from posting status updates regarding your state of inebriation, how much did you post on New Years Eve? People have money during the holidays, they get Christmas bonuses, they get cash as a gift, or they return terrible Christmas sweaters someone bought them. But what they don’t have a lot of is time. People are busy so the week between Christmas and New Years is dead.

The rest of the year seems pretty much the same in terms of activity online. This is anecdotal and comes from running about 8 websites for the last five years off and on. As far as Kickstarter activity goes, pledges seem to get back to normal a week or two after New Years. But if you’re running a 30 day project you can’t afford to lose two to three weeks to the holiday dead zone, so beware!!!

So if the holidays are busy for most people then when should you launch? Well everyone and their mother thinks that the summer is a great time to launch a project. Starting in November of 2012 I started tracking the active projects in Comics, Tabletop Gaming, and Art. I check on the first or second of each month and just made a note in a spreadsheet. Below is a graph that came from all that number crunching. Since the graph covers 15 months you can clearly see the pattern begin to repeat.

In the winter everyone seems to stay away from launching projects and then starting in the early spring people get launching! Art covers a lot of sub categories, that’s the reason for the high numbers there. All three categories bottom out in January. When looking at just comics and tabletop games you can see a steep rise in projects during the late summer months.

If You can help it, don’t launch July to October!! To me there’s just too much competition to get noticed. If you have a name that people recognize and have people working on your game or book that are household names then you could probably overcome it. But if you’re turning to KS as your last hope to get your dream project published, just wait a couple more months till the smoke clears. So with December and January mostly out because of the holiday dead week that leaves the Spring and maybe early November as possible launching points. But like I said, if you have a strong following, and some big names attached to your project you could probably overcome it. And if you’ve run more than one Kickstarter campaign that might help you stand above the crowd.

So good luck with your campaign, and if you have something ready to launch right now, I envy you!!

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