From the opinions and replies, I see three types of views people have. I picked some of the replies above and share them here. (Note: I chose these replies because they are easier to understand. But the other replies are equally informative and everyone should read through every replies.)
Here are what people think of ICO with long sale periods:
View #1. It is understandable. A long sale period can be something that is necessary for a the project to run smoothly down the line.There could be multiple reasons for extension of an existing defined sale date:
1. Project makers are considering market is not good to have a sale and they may loose potential investors
2. Legal reasons, they are not fully compliant and ready to start the sale and they are waiting for updates from there lawyers.
3. Other internal issue like team management, re-organization, re-structuring.
For the second example:
It is well known fact that there are ICOs which want to raise a big amount of money for there project and they are expecting that the project will take longer period of time then other ICOs to raise the funds they require, so they make the ICO sale for a long period of time.
For both the cases, these are not the factors for considering if the project is good or bad.
I think it is not so much the duration of the sale period that makes a problem for investors confidence, rather than that when they keep changing or delaying or postponing that affects confidence.
For me, if ABC says they will do 3 months presale, 3 months public sale and etc, I have no problems. But if they say 1 month and then suddenly becomes 5 months, or if they say 1 Jan but delay to 1 Jun, then I have a problem because if they can't even do ICO to schedule, then what about their roadmap?
Even 1 year is okay for me. But not EOS 1 year where there was no cap!
ICOs really need to think about reaching their soft cap now. 2017 was a great year for ICOs and most of the ICOs raised good money. But the situation has changed now and gathering funds is really tough. So, ICOs tend to be longer than before. I don’t think that the time span of raising funds actually affects the potentiality of the project.
View #2. Longer duration of sale makes it less appealing (in terms of profit).I don't really prefer the long duration ICO. projects. The long duration ICO projects pay you after longer duration. The reason maybe because they need more time to raise their funds.
I have not participated in Bounty programs yet, but I want to participate in short campaigns, 8-10 weeks. If the Bounty passes for such a period, then the project has a great product and a professional team. If the bounty lasts longer than the initial deadline, I will immediately abandon this project and start looking for new projects. If long periods of ICO sales, then I think they will not pay or very little pay.
The extension of the ICO, says the lack of interest of investors. If there is no interest, then there are no fees. If the ICO collects little money, then who will be interested in this project in the future?? After all, tomorrow there will be better and more powerful projects with their ICO and people will invest in them.
View #3. It will seem like a fraud if the duration is too long.I think it is negative impression created over the ICOs as investors think anything can be happened at the extra times. Many fraud ICOs take longer time and steal the money of investors. So I suggest to the ICOs to not take longer time than promised.
In the first case the ICO ABCD might have chances that they have not raised enough amount of money to develop the their project further which is why they had extended the duration of ICO. It may also be that they are not ready with the platform yet which might have lead to the extension of the ICO.
In the second case it might be that the ICO WXYZ have a bigger project to develop which is why they have took enough time to plan and develop the platform and hence this would have made them to plan a longer ICO period than usual.
If we take it as a negative side then in both the cases the chances for the ICO to extend the ICO period just to collect more money from the people and scam them are higher too.
The longer the ICO then it means that the people behind it are just trying to get even more money from it. It is not always good to make yourself a part of such a project as they could be scammers who are just trying to buy time to get as much money as possible before they leave. But in a bear, it could be that the ICO have not hit their target so they are trying to hit it.
