Kickstarter Crosses $1 Billion in Crowdsourced Pledges

Ben Cosman
Kickstarter Crosses $1 Billion in Crowdsourced Pledges

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter announced Monday that it reached a particularly notable milestone: $1 billion in pledges. 

Kickstarter, of course, is the most well known crowdfunding startup site, which allows people to get money for their artistic and business projects through donations from strangers on the Internet. A lot of strangers, giving a lot of money, apparently.

Some other interesting tidbits from Kickstarter's announcement:

  • The $1 billion comes from 5.7 million people.

  • Over 50 percent of the pledge total has been donated in the past year.

  • Wednesdays are the best day of the week, pledge-total wise.

  • The most donated on a single date is over $4 million on March 13, 2013.

Some Kickstarter projects are bigger than others, though. You can go to Kickstarter to fund pretty much anything, even if you're Zach Braff. As long as people want to give you money, it's cool. Among the most notable Kickstarter-born projects is Goldie Blocks, the engineering toy set aimed at girls, which had that memorable Super Bowl ad (and an equally memorable scrap with the Beastie Boys.)

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There is the Veronica Mars movie that was funded by pledges from die-hard fans. In fact, the movie's Kickstarter probably accounts for most of March 13, 2013's record setting day, seeing as it raised roughly $2.5 million in its first day on the site. Whether or not you think it's ethical for Hollywood types with plenty of cash to turn to average Americans to pay for their projects, it's pretty cool that a legitimate feature-length film was funded by the internet.

Here's how Kickstarter describes hitting the billion dollar mark: "$1 billion means that people care about new ideas [...] And that sharing them with our friends [...] our families and the entire internet can lead to some amazing stuff." 

Or, in other words, $1 billion for Kickstarter means it's officially cool.

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/technology/2014/03/kickstarter-officially-cool-crosses-1-billion-pledge-mark/358753/

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