BIG ambitions
KICKING UP A STORM
New York-based
dot.com Kickstarter is the world’s largest crowd-funding platform for creative projects, with over $2m pledged weekly to projects ranging from films, restaurants and museums to a pool in the Hudson River. Rhianon Howells reports
to rely on the patronage of wealthy benefactors such as the Medici fam- ily to fund his work. If he’d been alive today, it’s possible he would have turned to Kickstarter instead. The Medicis may seem to have little to do with a New York-based company that uses the internet to connect cre- ative projects with potential backers. But it can be argued that crowd-fund- ing ventures – jargon for
dot.coms that help people raise money from donors – are a direct ancestor of those great Renaissance patrons. “We view [what we do as being] at the intersection of commerce and arts patron- age,” says Kickstarter’s communications director Justin Kazmark. “There's this long past; Kickstarter was not really a new idea. What's made it successful has been a fair amount of good fortune, the generos- ity of the people that back the projects and the creativity of the people that launch them.”
H
Set up in 2009, Kickstarter is a website dedicated to raising money for creative projects by mobilising thou- sands of ordinary people. It’s a simple concept. Project creators use the site to pitch their ideas to the public over
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e may have painted the Sistine Chapel, but throughout his life as a jobbing artist Michelangelo was forced
a fixed time period of one to 60 days. They set a funding goal, explaining what the money will be used for, and if people like the idea, they can pledge anything from a few dollars to many thousands. Kickstarter’s project crea- tors also benefit from the opportunity to build a fan-base before the initia- tive is even off the ground. “Project creators come on initially to articu- late an idea and get enough funding to bring that idea to life,” says Kazmark. “What they leave with is a community of support.”
This is not the first time poten- tial audiences have been tapped to fund creativity; Kazmark argues that Beethoven was a pioneer of this
food to theatre and technology – and the company gets 200- 300 new proposals a day. In the last year, Kickstarter’s staff has doubled, from 15 to 30 people, to meet demand.
CREATIVE PURPOSE
To date, more than $100m has been pledged through the site and around 14,000 projects have been funded
approach when he pre-sold concert tick- ets to pay for new compositions. Even in the 21st century, Kickstarter isn't the only company to apply the princi- ple using the internet – the music and film industries have been at it for some time – however it is the largest crea- tive funding platform in the world and to date, more than $100m has been pledged through the website. Around 14,000 projects have been funded across 13 categories – from dance and
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The idea for Kickstarter was born in 2002. At that time, New Yorker Perry Chen was working in New Orleans and looking forward to the city’s annual Jazz Fest – so much so he thought it would be great to throw a concert during the fes- tival. Chen, whose CV includes stints as an audio engineer, musician, writer, art gallery co-founder and day trader, was no stranger to either the arts or busi- ness. But unable to raise the funds to fly the artist he wanted from Europe, he was faced with fronting the money himself then trying
to recoup it through ticket sales later on. In the end, he decided the whole venture was just too much of a risk. “After the dust settled, he started thinking that there must be a way to get the audience involved with bring- ing [creative projects like this] to life,” says Kazmark, who has been with the company since its early days. In 2005, Chen moved back to
New York, and shared his idea with Yancey Strickler, a music journalist,
ISSUE 1 2012 © cybertrek 2011
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