BackerClub Forums

Sad news Kickspy is shutting down.
http://www.kickspy.com/ShuttingDown

No way. Why would ks make them close shop?

Wow that's sad news. Maybe they've found better ways to monetize what they do?

Kickspy, Crowdlogs and Crowdcharts are able to collect data for individual reward tiers. I also collect reward tier data, but only for video game projects on Kickstarter. Kicktraq appears to just monitor the net changes in the total pledged and number of backers. Only Kickspy seems to be shutting down right now, so the question is what makes it different?

Kickspy was the only tool tracking individual backer data that I was aware of. You could see what other projects were pledged to by the backers of a specific project. Remember that the "Backers" tab was removed on Kickstarter project pages. This is speculation, but Kickstarter may not like the idea of that information being available.

Kicktraq (Not Kickspy) had something changed recently. Crawlers are no longer indexing the pages within Kicktraq itself. A test is to go search "[Name of project] kicktraq" in Google. Previously the top result would be the specific Kicktraq page. For a popular project it may show Kicktraq's hotlist as a result.

Because of this change I haven't been including Kicktraq's graphs in my graph posts on Imgur recently. I would have to go through the extra time cost of manually searching for the page of a campaign through Kicktraq's own search bar.

I am wondering it Kickstarter is cracking down on its search engine optimization (SEO) and sites like Kicktraq were appearing too high in the results.

That is interesting Lobster. It wasn't until recently - this group & Exploding Kittens I became aware of all these tools for tracking projects. Sad to see them going away/becoming less relevant.

Kickstarter has introduced a new spotlight feature. A project creator that delivered can use it to create a link to a web store or even the official Twitter account of the project creator. I wonder if this new feature was a contributing factor in asking Kickspy to stop since these spotlights would benefit from less competition in the search engine results.