I’ve been looking into Kickstarter a lot over the last year, if you’re a journo, you might remember Spot.Us, Kickstarter is basically the same thing but with lots more poetry projects and bad videos.
There’s so much out there about how amazing it is, but I don’t know… the platform’s been picking up steam for a while. During my six month road trip across the US, I met lots of people who had used it or where curious about it. Kickstarter was the little artist site that could. I hoped it would stay little, but like a puppy it grew and grew and before it knew it was too big for it’s old sleeping spot.
I’ve been analyzing how Kickstarter (and crowd funding) ticks and trying to decide if it’s the best path for my next project — but we’ll get into that later then I send you an e-mail after not talking to you since high school.
There’s a lot of good that comes out of it but we all know about some of the more questionable projects.
I’ve been worried for a while that by the time I work up the nerve to make my project public, I’ll have missed the boat, now I know my days are numbered. Ever since Tim Schafer raised over a million dollars in under 24 hours back in Feb, the writing has been on the wall. Kickstarter is about to be hijacked by the mainstream masses and loose it’s indy creed. It’s already happened you could argue. Perhaps this is an opportunity for IndyGoGo or USAProjects to take up the mantle as the artist’s platform?
For now Kickstarter is the big kid and that’s good for getting attention for the tech bloggers and social spear… but it’s looking like as we more forward, how much you can raise is entierly dependent on how good your network is. In other words, the people giving your money are probably no longer going to be strangers but people you’ve personally asked and then if you’re lucky a few of their friends by word of mouth going viral.
I know that the I’ve funded a few (wished I could have funded a few more) so far because I was asked to by a friend or a colleague whose work I admired. And thus far, they’ll all been projects I’m already interested in or people who I want to help. None have been random finds, and I suspect this will be the norm moving forward*. Yes, an *, it’s my website I can do that if I want; I think there will be those random .01% of projects that will go viral though Reddit or TechCrunch or Twitter that will raise money from strangers. These will be the ones we point to and say “look, see, random people will invest!” But, let’s get real, the vast majority of projects will not see this public outpouring of support. You’d be lucky to have some blogger or Gawker talk about you and make snarky comments.
Which might not be so bad really.
Or you can just try to be meta to the max.
