Is Kickstarter the "Next Big Thing"?

In this week’s edition of This Week in Google talked about an upcoming website called “Kickstarter”. Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/) is a site that allows funding for creative projects. Interested parties can create a “Kickstarter” in order to fund a project that falls under the categories “Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Techology and Theater”. All Kickstarter projects must have a complete and clear goal/project idea in order for it to be approved. Since it was launched in 2009, Kickstarter has funded “more than 30,000 creative projects”; and “over $350 million has been pledged by more than 2.5 million people”. One aspect of Kickstarter that makes it special is its “all or nothing” funding. Basically, it means that if the project does not make the minimum goal, all of the pledged money will be sent back to the pledgers and the project will not be funded. Also, when you pledge a certain amount of money, many projects (assuming that they reach their goal) will give the person who pledged a gift or prize or in some cases a copy of their product.

A good example of a successful Kickstarter project was the Homestuck Adventure Game by MS Paint Adventures (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14293468/homestuck-adventure-game). 

Homestuck is an online web comic by Andrew Hussie that has grown in popularity over the past two years.  After much pestering, Hussie finally caved to fans and created a Kickstarter to raise money in order to create a Homestuck “Adventure Game”. Hussie only set $700,000 as his project goal but ended up receiving $2,485,506 in the end. This project actually broke a Kickstarter record, gaining it’s set goal in about 32 hours. Due to the extra money he was gaining while the Kickstarter was still going, Hussie ended up adding more components onto the project as more money was pledged. 

This gave fans more of an incentive to actually make a pledge or pledge more money in order to gain the new tiers of prizes.

So far, Kickstarter has been quite successful in it’s first few years of existence. I think that Kickstarter is a good example of a website that promotes a good sense of community as well as promoting the individual. People are able to create goals or projects based on their dreams or desires and then the community can help by donating money for the cause or project. The Homestuck fandom is a great example of how a community can come together to reach their goals through a site like Kickstarter. Hopefully, the success Kickstarter has seen in its few short years will continue to grow in the site’s future.