The Open Bundle was a crowdfunding campaign to uncopyright a collection of game soundtracks and art. The goal was $10000, and it ran from June 24th to July 15th. Not only did the campaign succeed, it exceeded its goal by 20%, for a total of $12088 from 744 backers!
Top 5 Takeaways:
- The most funds came from Friends, Fans, and Social News sites.
- We could nudge people with selection options and reward tiers.
- Backers cared much more about supporting the artists than supporting charity.
- It's worth supporting Credit Card and Bitcoin. (Paypal is still unpleasant... but widely used)
- We still have lots to explore with open-source funding!
These five lessons will be covered in greater depth in the next five sections.
Milestone Dates
- June 24: Launch on Newgrounds, /r/Gamedev, and our social networks
- July 1: Featured on the Creative Commons blog. (Not a huge effect)
- July 3: GameBuilders & Newgrounds chipped in $300 each on the same day. (after my Newgrounds News Post)
- July 11: Someone we don't know posted about The Open Bundle on r/gamedev, it got 175 upvotes and #1 spot.
- July 14: Someone we don't know posted on Hacker News, 97 upvotes and #5 on frontpage! (Also, a lot of Twitter activity)
Total dollars pledged per day
Notice the saddle-like curve; most of the traffic and donations came in the beginning and near the end of the campaign. This is typical of all fundraisers.
Total number of people pledged per day
Daily web traffic
A note about outreach
The biggest pushes came from our direct network and social news sites:
- Direct outreach to all our Newgrounds fanbases.
- Direct outreach to friends & peers.
- Being #5 on the frontpage of Hacker News.
- Being #1 on the frontpage of /r/gamedev twice.
However, the following did not have a visible effect on donations, views, or backers: (at least not in an immediate, obvious way)
- Cross-promotion through my other projects, Crowdtuts and Sprite2GIF.
- Newsletters (on the Commonly newsletter)
- Press (Niche blogs, Creative Commons blog, and trying to get on bigger blogs, to little avail.)
- Banner ads (on the Bombermine.com site)
It's a rough estimate, but in order of Result-to-Effort:
Hacker News > Gamedev Subreddit > Fanbase > Friends > Press > Cross-promos > Banner ads
Here's a graph of the dollar amount each person donated. (It's unlabelled, but it's the shape that's the important thing)
This graph shows that selectable options helps nudge people. (So, choose your reward tiers wisely.)
Each plateau is a selectable pricing option. ($10 | $25 | $50 | $100) Note that each plateau roughly doubles in height, while roughly halves in width. This means as price doubles, the number of people who choose it roughly halves. And then, there's a long tail (a mass of $1 backers) and huge head (a few super-generous peoples) at both ends of this graph.
- $100 or more: from 23 backers (3%)
- $50 to $99.99: from 42 backers (6%)
- $25 to $49.99: from 100 backers (13%)
- $10 to $24.99: from 211 backers (28%)
- Less than $10: from 368 backers (49%)
You had four options for how you would like to split your donation amongst the six artists and two charities.
Here's what people chose:
- 79% chose Default Split (15% per artist, 5% per charity)
- 15% chose All Equally to Artists (16% per artist)
- 1% chose All Equally to Charities (50% per charity)
- 5% chose to fully customize their split
What I find surprising is that despite this being a very "ideological" campaign, and that most people didn't know who we were, only 1% chose All To Charity and 15% chose All To Artists. However, in the end, that had no significant effect on the total splits for each artist and charity.
As you can see, they all ended up very close to the default splits anyway.
- Halcy: $1815.95 (~15%)
- Jimpy: $1792.14 (~15%)
- Ncase: $1925.73 (~16%)
- Strat: $1790.25 (~15%)
- Kenny: $1797.00 (~15%)
- Mindc: $1790.41 (~15%)
- CC: $603.27 (~5%)
- EFF: $591.70 (~5%)
They're all within $15 of the default splits, with the exception of mine because my mom put in a $111.11 donation all to me. (Thanks mom. Yes, I'll call you more often. I love you too, mom.) Note that this does not take into account the Paypal/credit card/bitcoin transaction fees. (As a result, I don't get $1900 in leftovers, probably closer to $1500, depending on the bitcoin exchange rate.)
Note: I only added the ability to set your own split a week after the campaign began. Because the first week involved a lot of outreach to our fanbases on Newgrounds, perhaps the final totals would be further from the default split, if I had added the feature from the beginning.
The Open Bundle provided three methods of payment: bitcoin, (through Coinbase) credit card, (through Stripe) and Paypal. Here's the breakdown.
- Bitcoin: $821.06 from 24 people. (Average: $34) (3% of all backers)
- Credit: $3376.66 from 181 people. (Average: $19) (24% of all backers)
- Paypal: $7736.04 from 536 people. (Average: $14) (72% of all backers)
- Other: $153.11 from 2 people.
"Other" refers to two manual entries into our database, for payments I had received outside of the system. These two payments were: $111.11 from my dear ol' ma, and $42 from a friend who's obviously a big Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy fan.
People using any of these payment methods are equally generous. It might seem that bitcoin donators are far more generous, but this is simply because of one outlier. Bittracks.com gave $500 worth of bitcoin, the highest donation received. Removing that outlier gives us an average of $14 USD worth per bitcoin donation.
However, Paypal gave me lots of trouble. They failed to notify my server of many transactions, and they limited my Paypal account three days before the end of the campaign, because they suspected a $1 transaction was fraudulent. Paypal brings only pain and suffering. However, they were 72% of all donations, and I don't know how many of them would have otherwise chosen Credit Card or bitcoin.
Testing out the Ransom Publishing Model led to many great lessons, and even more questions:
Would people really risk creating a whole bunch of art and music in advance? Their crowdfunding campaign could very well fail. Then again... the traditional ways of monetizing digital goods (selling copies, advertising) all could fail too, and they also only let you get money after you've already made something.
Would people want to pay for something that will eventually be free? Thanks to The Pirate Bay, everything's free if you look hard enough anyway. Then again... maybe altruism, pride, and exclusive rewards are enough to counter most of this.
Isn't the Ransom Publishing Model counter to the philosophy of openness? It means you have to keep your works locked down until release day. Then again... at least Ransom unlocks it entirely upon release, unlike other monetization models which require lockdown for as long as possible.
Future Ideas to Explore:
- What if the "failure" of a crowdfunding campaign were less risky?
- What if you could get money during the development process?
- What exclusive rewards could you give for people who back open source work?
- How can you use openness to have an advantage? (free exposure, crowdsourcing?)
- How can your audience help develop, not just fund, the product?
We're still exploring models of how to fund openness.
I hope you'll join us, as we explore further!
Yours,
~ Nick