So I’m working on this new project and planning to launch in the next little while and part of the project requires me to research places like Kickstarter and Indiegogo about the least successful projects that are on both sites (In case your interested, this project was spurred by my post Failure Is More Interesting Than Success) I just went back to Kickstarter to take a look and see how I could find these least successful projects and guess what? They seem to have redesigned the site to make it almost impossible to find these projects!

The only thing that shows up on the home page is “staff picks” “popular this week” “recently successfully funded” and “most funded”. The only way to get to these sites in the recesses of Kickstarter is to go to “Most Popular” and keep scrolling down. Still my guess is that we are still not seeing everything.

Where are the unfunded projects? Where can I see a list of everything that’s closed but not funded – you know like on eBay where I can see the stuff which was listed and not sold? Hmm. Why can’t I see THOSE projects anymore. This is why, direct off the Kickstarter FAQ page:

Are projects that were not successfully funded browsable on Kickstarter?

Kickstarter doesn’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful, however unsuccessfully funded projects are accessible through Kickstarter’s search and the profile pages of the project’s creator and backers. When users click on a creator’s profile they can see all of the creator’s past projects — successfully and unsuccessfully funded.

In terms of external search (Google, Bing, etc.), Kickstarter de-indexes projects whose funding was unsuccessful. This means that unsuccessfully funded projects don’t show up in those search results. This was implemented after receiving many requests from former project creators who were finding their unsuccessfully funded projects ranking extremely high — in some cases as the #1 result — in Google searches for their name.

Unlike Google, where you can get to the tail of search, you can’t even get to the tail of crowdfunding, even thought thats where some of the coolest stuff lies.

Leads me to only think about one thing: these sites are so deathly afraid of showing off their failures that they purposely hide them. At least Indiegogo lets me go to page 453, like Google….

The tail of crowdfunding needs a face….and maybe we can give it one….