With over 5.7 million people donating a total of just over $1bn, it is safe to say that crowd funding site Kickstarter should be passing the celebratory cake around and certainly in the direction of its users!
The website was set up back in 2009 by Perry Chen and a few others and since then, the website has been a big boom to help people fund others work where larger companies refuse to fund as the idea is too small and so on. This is how it works,  Project creators choose a deadline and a minimum funding goal. If the goal is not met by the deadline, no funds are collected, a kind of assurance contract. Money pledged by donors is collected using Amazon payments. The platform is open to backers from anywhere in the world and to creators from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Important to note is that the past 12 months alone has brought almost half of the pledges so the website is most likely preparing for another milestone very shortly.
Below are a few statistics to get your mind working:
- The top country for pledges was the US, raising a total of $663,316,496 for creative projects around the world. The UK came in second at $54,427,475 and in third place we have Canada bringing in $44,913,678
- According to Kickstarter the most money is usually raised on a Wednesday
- Neil Gaiman, the author of Coraline, is the most influential Kickstarter user
- Espen Artzen is the most Arctic user, living just a two hour flight away from the North Pole
- Tieg Zaharia is the last on the list and is apparently the ‘most Kickstarter’ after backing more than 1000 projects.
So what do you think, is it worth it? have you ever backed a project using Kickstarter?
