Looking at why the Meson crowdfunding campaign failed

The crowdfunding campaign to create a full manual for the Meson build system ended yesterday. It did not reach its 10 000€ goal so the book will not be produced and instead all contributed money will be returned. I'd like to thank everyone who participated. A special thanks goes out to Centricular for their bronze corporate sponsorship (which, interestingly, was almost 50% of the total money raised).

Nevertheless the fact remains that this project was a failure and a fairly major one at that since it did not reach even one third of its target. This can not be helped, but maybe we can salvage some pieces of useful information from the ruins.

Some statistics

There were a total of 42 contributors to the campaign. Indiegogo says that a total of 596 people visited the project when it was live. Thus roughly 7% of all people who came to the site participated. It is harder to know how many people saw information about the campaign without coming to the site. Estimating based on numbers based on the blog's readership, Twitter reach and other sources puts the number at around 5000 globally (with a fairly large margin of error). This would indicate a conversion rate of 1% of all the people who saw any information about the campaign. In reality the percentage is lower since many of the contributors were people who did not really need convincing. Thus the conversion rate is probably closer to 0.5% or even lower.

The project was set up so that 300 contributors would have been enough to make the project a success. Given the number of people using Meson (estimated to be in the tens of thousands) this seemed like a reasonable goal. Turns out that it wasn't. Given these conversion numbers you'd need to reach 30 000 – 60 000 people in order to succeed. For a small project with zero advertising budget this seems like a hard thing to achieve.

On the Internet everything drowns

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and the like are not very good channels for spreading information. They are firehoses where any one post has an active time of maybe one second if you are lucky. And if you are not, the platforms' algorithms will hide your post because they deem it "uninteresting".  Sadly filtering seems to be mandatory, because not having it makes the firehose even more unreadable. The only hope you have is that someone popular writes about your project. In practice this can only be achieved via personal connections.

Reddit-like aggregation sites are not much better, because you have basically two choices: either post on a popular subreddit or an unpopulare one. In the first case your post probably won't even make it on the front page, all it takes is a few downvotes because the post is "not interesting" or "does not belong here". A post that is not on the front page might not as well even exist; no-one will read it. Posting on an non-popular area is no better. Your post is there but it will reach 10 people and out of those maybe 1 will click on the link.

New sites are great for getting the information out, but they suffer from the same popularity problem as everything else. A distilled (and only slightly snarky) explanation is that news sites write mainly about two things:

1. Things they have already written about (i.e. have deemed popular)
2. Things other news sites write about (i.e. that other people have deemed popular)

This is not really the fault of news sites. They are doing their best on a very difficult job. This is just how the world and popularity work. Things that are popular get more popular because of their current popularity alone. Things that are not popular are unlikely to ever become popular because of their current unpopularity alone.

Unexpected requirements

One of the goals of this campaign (or experiment, really) was to see if selling manuals would be a sustainable way to compensate FOSS project developers and maintainers for their work. If working this would be a good way for compensation, because there are already established legal practices for selling books across the world. Transferring money in other ways (donations etc) is difficult and there may be legal obstacles.

Based on this one experiment this does not seem to be a feasible approach. Interestingly multiple people let me know that they would not be participating because the end result would not be released under a free license. Presumably the same people do not complain to book store tellers that "I will only buy this Harry Potter book if, immediately after my purchase, the full book is released for free on the Internet". But for some reason there is a hidden assumption that because a person has released something under a free license, they must publish everything else they do under free licenses as well.

These additional limitations make this model of charging for docs really hard to pull off. There is no possibility of steady, long term money flow because once a book is out under a free license it becomes unsellable. People will just download the free PDF instead. A completely different model (or implementation of the attempted model) seems to be needed.

So what happens next?

I don't really know. Maybe the book can get published through an actual publisher. Maybe not. Maybe I'll just take a break from the whole thing and get back to it later. But to end on some kind of a positive note I have extracted one chapter from the book and have posted it here in PDF form for everyone to read. Enjoy.