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Kickstarter hides failed projects
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    When I first noticed that Kickstarter’s web interface wasn’t showing me any failures, I wanted to be sure. To confirm my suspicions, I wrote a scraper (using the excellent Scrapy framework) designed to browse through Kickstarter’s Discover pages, extracting project details from every single campaign page it could find.

    The result: 27,399 projects. Every single project my scraper could find was either successful or in progress.

    This means that if you’re a human being (instead of a scraper) you could browse Kickstarter’s Discovery section for days, weeks, or months. You could look at more than 27,000 projects. And you’d never come across a failure.

    Links to failed Kickstarter projects still work. For example, I can still link to Instaprint, a project that failed to meet its funding goal on April 29. Or, if you know the name of a failed project, you can search for it using Kickstarter’s search engine.

    But here’s the thing: search for failed project on Google, or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, and the Kickstarter project page is nowhere in the results.

    Why?

    In the header section of every single failed Kickstarter project I could find, I found this robots meta tag:

    This tag, which shows up on failed Kickstarter projects, but not on successful or in progress projects, tells search engines to ignore the page.

    Kickstarter doesn’t pull failures off their site. They just make it difficult to find them through third-party search engines.

    Via: http://misener.org/archives/1354

  • 2 Replies sorted by
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    And temporary closes non failed :-)

    GameStick, the portable Android gaming console that runs on a stick, has been pulled from Kickstarter. Anyone attempting to access the project page will be presented with a message saying that the product "is the subject of an intellectual property dispute and currently unavailable."

    http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/10/3861448/gamestick-pulled-from-kickstarter

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    In November, the company behind Europe's biggest ever Kickstarter project told its backers it was shutting down. The Torquing Group had raised more than £2.3 million ($3.6 million) to fund its palm-sized Zano drone, but after delivering only around 600 of the 15,363 units paid for, the company went into liquidation.

    Now, with frustrated backers still smarting from their loss, Kickstarter wants to find out what went wrong. The company has hired technology journalist Mark Harris "to write a story about the collapse of the Zano drone project on Kickstarter."

    I really like approach. Someone robs you and as you go into police instead of finding and prosecuting the guy it hires journalist using your own money to present case as it was you that caused the robbery by improper behaviour.

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