In a big year for self-funding and crowd-funding, it’s hard to imagine 2012 without Kickstarter. The company revealed some stats on how it is used in a presentation posted Tuesday, highlighting just how big the platform has grown — and what it wants to emphasize about its success.
Kickstarter backers pledged more than $ 300 million for a variety of projects, from an app that tells you when it will rain to a bus stop construction in Athens, Georgia. But as my colleague Ki Mae Huessner pointed out in GigaOM’s post on our favorite Kickstarter projects of the year, there are certainly some questions about the platform’s success.
Plenty of projects don’t hit their deadlines and entrepreneurs have sometimes struggled to meet the demand for scale from backers. However, as Om Malik wrote in his interview with founder Perry Chen, Kickstarter is a visual representation of the crowd funding movement that’s providing new ways for entrepreneurs and makers to access capital.
Here are some of the most interest pieces of information from the Kickstarter year in review, which can be viewed in full here:
- More than 2 million people pledged $ 319,786,629 and successfully funded 18,109 projects
- More than $ 274 million was actually collected via funded projects
- Of the more than 2 million people who backed a project, 452 people backed more than 100 projects
- Music had the most projects funded (5,067) but games had the most money pledged ($ 83 million)
- Only 17 projects raised more than $ 1 million
- 10 percent of films at Sundance were funded through Kickstarter, and a Kickstarter-funded film was nominated for an Oscar, and a Kickstarter-funded opera came to the Kennedy Center
- Kickstarter funds the world’s first pizza museum
And here are the categories Kickstarter used to break down the funding:
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