Yeah, the data seems a bit messy. Of the three projects listed as "from" Pyongyang and successfully funded, all three appear to actually be U.S.-based people/groups. Two of them hope to use the Kickstarter money to travel to North Korea, while one of them plans to write about North Korea from NYC.
If it's possible to extract the data, I would probably use the location of the person running each project (listed under their name in the right sidebar), rather than whatever location they've tagged the project with. But this might not matter a lot; they seem to usually be the same location.
I believe in their case they used a U.S.-based publisher or agent to handle the funds (not sure of the exact arrangement), since Denmark isn't in the list of locations Kickstarter supports. But seems like KS still let them put down Copenhagen as the company location.
The funding target (individual or entity) has to be in US/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ. Basically your bank account has to have a US billing address, you as project creator can live anywhere. You can do this by having an account in the US, or commonly having a "middle-man" who is (usually) part of your project team who is receiving the funds.
The reason for this is that these are the only countries where Kickstarter is authorized to legally disburse funds to individuals or companies. They send out possibly large amounts of money, so they need to make sure they close all the legal ends. You can get a clue of how complicated it is for them looking at their Payments FAQ, where they have a separate one for each country they're allowing creators to operate from:
They need to jump a bunch of legal hurdles anywhere or risk getting in trouble, being prevented from holding up their end of the deal, pay a large fine, get bad press/rep, etc. It's more complicated than just being authorized to do business in the country.
The problem with heat maps, like this one, is they end up effectively as maps of population density. To make a heat map informative, consider coloring the map zones proportionately to the population in that area.
Not entirely true in this case. If it were then you'd expect to see more in Europe and Asia than this map shows. In the US it does devolve to a population density map.
This is not where the money came from, but where it went, right? So how come there are so many countries? Isn't Kickstarter working only in a handful of countries (basically wherever Amazon is)? But I see a lot of other places, too.
"The data set I scraped shows $957,512,698 total pledged (I am missing a few campaigns that threw errors when scraping) across 131,348 total campaigns."
Thats an impressive amount of scraping. I wonder if kickstarter noticed. Probably not given their volume of traffic must be quite large.
Why does the UK have so much more than the rest of Europe? Is this becuase they speak english or do they have more of an entrepreneurial attitude than everyone else?
UK is the only European country currently where "you can create a kickstarter project", ie, where you can have a local bank account and receive Kickstarter funds. Any other European country needs a US/UK (or other valid country) bank account (themselves or a "middle man") to receive their funding.
Which creators have this option is obviously the main factor influencing where creators are from in Europe.
Nice. It would be interesting to see more visualizations or summary statistics that show what type of phrases, topics, or other features of a Kickstarter campaign make it most likely to get funded.
Really simple to use. Just uploaded a CSV into the platform for this, set the GEOM from lat/lon I had already configured in columns, and changed the date string into a SQL Data, then simple click interface for creating each visualization. All told took no more than 5 mins for each visualization.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 91.0 ms ] threadhttps://www.kickstarter.com/discover/places/pyongyang-kp?ref...
If it's possible to extract the data, I would probably use the location of the person running each project (listed under their name in the right sidebar), rather than whatever location they've tagged the project with. But this might not matter a lot; they seem to usually be the same location.
How do people outside of these create campaigns?
I believe in their case they used a U.S.-based publisher or agent to handle the funds (not sure of the exact arrangement), since Denmark isn't in the list of locations Kickstarter supports. But seems like KS still let them put down Copenhagen as the company location.
The funding target (individual or entity) has to be in US/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ. Basically your bank account has to have a US billing address, you as project creator can live anywhere. You can do this by having an account in the US, or commonly having a "middle-man" who is (usually) part of your project team who is receiving the funds.
The reason for this is that these are the only countries where Kickstarter is authorized to legally disburse funds to individuals or companies. They send out possibly large amounts of money, so they need to make sure they close all the legal ends. You can get a clue of how complicated it is for them looking at their Payments FAQ, where they have a separate one for each country they're allowing creators to operate from:
https://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/creator+questions?ref=f...
They need to jump a bunch of legal hurdles anywhere or risk getting in trouble, being prevented from holding up their end of the deal, pay a large fine, get bad press/rep, etc. It's more complicated than just being authorized to do business in the country.
Thats an impressive amount of scraping. I wonder if kickstarter noticed. Probably not given their volume of traffic must be quite large.
Which creators have this option is obviously the main factor influencing where creators are from in Europe.
We all can learn how the failures fail. It is HN.
Nice visualization, btw. It actually shows something, unlike a lot of vizzes.