Guess who just made a semi-significant funding milestone? No, it’s not the ‘charity to help kids with aids’; it’s Kickstarter! The invest-to-develop crowdfunding website will be four years old next month, but this morning it announced that the Kickstarter $1 billion day has finally come to fruition.
That’s $1 billion in contributed funds, not in successful endeavors.
Only about 859 million of those dollars were actually used to fund projects. The rest were earmarked for various items, but customers were refunded when the Kickstarter goal wasn’t reached.
So it’s really not the Kickstarter $1 billion day, but close enough. I’m sure it’ll happen sometime this year anyways.
The crowdfunding phenomenon has been hitting its peak in the past year or so, with users donating more than half of the $1 billion in these 12 months alone. It’s not really a stretch then to think that the next twelve will be able to whip together a relatively small $141 million without much trouble.
Then again, maybe the mass of 5.7 million contributors are pretty well broke by now.
Still, completely truthful or not, the Kickstarter 1 billion day is pretty impressive. After a start of only $1,084 for seven projects on its first day back on April 28, 2009, the site has pretty much become an industry on its own.
Unfortunately, that industry might be seeing some roadblocks as more and more highly-anticipated releases fail to amaze. It seems that Kickstarter might not be the amazing fund-everything idea some people have dreamed about.
I’m still waiting on one fantastic game to make me think it’s all been worthwhile.
Come on Sim Hero, you can do it!
[Photo Credit: Getty Images]
