Nearly half of the ICOs launched in 2017 failed

"Of the initial coin offerings that blasted onto the scene in 2017 along with the price of bitcoin, 46 percent have failed.
That’s according to Engadget, which — citing data from TokenData — reported that of the 902 ICOs in 2017, 46 percent have failed. Among that percentage, 142 never got the funding and another 276 have faded away or were scams. What’s more, the report noted that another 113 ICOs have stopped talking about their project online or haven’t had enough adopters that success will be likely. Of the survivors, the report noted that only a few have raised more than $10 million via an ICO.
According to Engadget, excluding the ICOs that were outright scams, it’s not surprising that many of the ICOs and the virtual coins failed to take off. Many were focused on niches such as dentistry or trucking, while others were riding the coattails of other successful tokens and thus didn’t stand out enough to get traction. The report noted that ICOs remain popular this year, but there’s no guarantee that they will have a better go at it."

Source:  PYMNTS, 26th February 2018

35 creators on Patreon make more than $150,000 a year

"Patreon’s novel idea of fans just directly paying the artists they love is having its hockey stick moment. Patreon tells TechCrunch that in a year, it’s doubled the number of monthly active paying patrons to 1 million, and the number of active creators to 50,000. It’s now on track to pay out $150 million to creators in 2017, which would make its 5 percent cut equal $7.5 million in revenue. That’s after paying out $100 million total since 2014.
Videographers, musicians, writers, illustrators, animators, podcasters, game developers and more artists are finding steady income through Patreon at a time when other platforms look shaky for creators.
After the PewDiePie scandal alerted advertisers that they were appearing alongside objectionable content, YouTube has started letting them filter out certain channels. The result has been a decrease in monetization for YouTube stars. Vine died. Snapchat has neglected creators, refused to offer them direct monetization options and now has seen view counts fall due to ditching auto-advance and competition from Instagram.
Meanwhile, Instagram doesn’t offer ad revenue splits with creators. Facebook has begun to give some video makers 55 percent of the revenue from ad breaks they insert in their clips, but the program has yet to scale. Ad-supported platforms often pay merely $0.10 to $0.0005 per view, so creators have to be broadly popular to earn a living.
Yet on Patreon, contributors frequently cough up $5 per month to each of their favorite creators, who make 50X to 10,000X more per fan than on ads. In exchange, creators offer the art they’ve made that month, reserving premium access and rewards to those who pay more. Thirty-five creators made more than $150,000 in 2016, and thousands earn more than $25,000 a year."

Source:  TechCrunch, 18th May 2017

Over 20% of funds raised on Kickstarter are for games

"The numbers behind gaming’s growth on the site are striking. In total, fans have pledged over $580 million (£465m) to in excess of 20,000 successful campaigns – more than 20% of all funds raised on the platform. Tabletop games have done particularly well; in 2016, a six-month study found that board, card and roleplaying games had attracted six times as much funding as their digital counterparts.
Crane attributes this success to a range of benefits the site offers creators.
“With Kickstarter it’s really easy to make your games look nice,” he says. “You can show off your minis, really zoom in to the gorgeous details of a game in a way that’s difficult to do on another platform or on Amazon.”
He adds that the open nature of the service gives creators a level of creative freedom that might not be on offer from established, traditional publishers, pointing to the horror game Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, which recently raised over $12.3 million (£9.9m), making it the highest-funded games project in the site’s history."

Source:  Tabletop Gaming, 9th May 2017