OOTS: Unlikely Kickstarter Success Story
Long-time readers know WC is a fan of Rich Burlew’s stick-figure web comic, The Order of the Stick. OOTS, as it is more commonly known, is probably one of the top ten web comics in terms of readership, despite its irregular postings and occasionally maddening plot distractions. The geeky humor is wonderful, and Burlew’s willingness to thumb his nose at the Fourth Wall is always good for a smile. And his plotting is simply terrific.
Burlew has published six volumes of the cartoons, but all of them have gone out of print. In response to requests from fans for copies of the out of print volumes, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $57,750 in thirty days, to fund reprinting of a volume.
OOTS' Interpretation of Kickstarter
(In a typical bit of sly Burlew humor, the characters lined up to kick the bound Belkar are characters Belkar has killed.) So what we have is a Kickstater campaign trying to raise $57,650 to publish a geeky Dungeons & Dragons™ cartoon book drawn with stick figures.
How, you ask, has Burlew done?
With three days left in the campaign, he has raised $847,127 from a total of 10,676 backers. You read that right. Fifteen times the target. The folks who have made pledges get only swag: OOTS stuff. There’s no profit-sharing. No interest-paying notes. Seriously, the pledge drive’s return on investment is measured in refrigerator magnets.
Average Return on Investment
Yet there are 10,676 citizens out there who found that attractive enough to make an average pledge of nearly $80 each. WC isn’t much on sociology or any of the fuzzy sciences, but this phenomenon deserves some research.
By all means, visit the comic and get an idea what OOTS-madness is all about. Warning: the site can suck up immense amounts of time (there are some 838 cartoons posted) and you may hurt yourself laughing.
Right now, though, WC has to go make a pledge.
UPDATE: as of early evening February 19, Burlew’s Kickstarter pledge total is over $1 million. Extraordinary.
