New York’s finest funding platform, Kickstarter, has helped its 10,000th project secure backing this month. On July 6th a Toledo, Ohio-based band called Citizen raised $830 from 28 backers to produce a new seven-inch. This was $30 more than the band had hoped to raise and came mostly from pledges of $30 or less. It was micro-financing for creative expression at its finest.
Kickstarter’s Fred Benenson and Yancey Strickler put together some great data on what the company has been up to for its first two years. So far more than 26,000 projects have been launched on Kickstarter and 44 percent have been successfully funded. It funded 1,044 projects in its first year and 1,044 in just the month of June, 2011. Music is the leading category, followed by film/video, art, theater and publishing.
The amount of money flowing through Kickstarter is accelerating rapidly. It raised $50 million in its first two years of existence and $10 million in just the last ten weeks. For the curious reader, here are the 10,000 successful projects compressed into a 5:30 minute video. Kickstarter is currently still sorting through all project submissions by hand, but it looks like we might have to eat a little crow on that whole – DIY doesn’t scale thing…
