Kickstarter, for those of you who don’t know, is a crowdfunding website for innovating projects. It’s basically a site where people pitch ideas they have and others can choose to give them money in the hope they use it to create the final product which the ‘backer’ will eventually receive.
Why is this newsworthy? Kickstarter projects have now received over $1 billion in “pledges” in its four years since birth on April 29th 2009 – that’s a billion in USD, by the way – with over a half of that being pledged in the last 12 months and by a total of 5.7 million people, showing a huge increase in the site’s popularity. $663 million of this came from people in the US, with the second most generous country being the UK with $54 million in backing.
According to Kickstarter’s stat page, $859 million has gone towards completed projects so far, with the rest representing ongoing projects and the odd failed idea. So far there have been 57,121 successful projects thanks to Kickstarter pledges, with Kickstarter taking a 5% cut from each one which has netted them an easy $43 million for such a very simple idea.
It’s not all been plain sailing for Kickstarter with 74,042 unsuccessful projects, and the recent news that they had suffered a security breach during which hackers had attempted to obtain user information. Although there was no evidence to suggest the hackers were successful, Kickstarter did note unauthorised activity on several accounts.
Many Kickstarter projects reach their goal and then go on to fail regardless, with one study suggesting that the percentage of projects that actually went on to be completed was as low as 37% with the lowest being 25% in the tech category. It would seem that whilst Kickstarter is great, tech ideas still struggle to get off the ground. Have you backed and eventually received anything from Kickstarter?