<story><title>Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges</title><url>https://www.kickstarter.com/1billion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>basicallydan</author><text>Congratulations, Kickstarter.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, Kickstarter is one of the most important tech startups of the last few years for democratising the process of project funding so significantly. It&amp;#x27;s started to change the way people do business and create things in such a fundamental way.&lt;p&gt;One of my favourite examples to give is the way in which games can now be funded. The truth of the matter is that games can cost a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; more than they used to, but for the last 15 years Publishers have had such a strong influence over which games do or do not make it to market and they &lt;i&gt;know&lt;/i&gt; that a mass market game is going to be less risky than something like Double Fine&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;Broken Age&lt;/i&gt;. So they probably won&amp;#x27;t fund it, and I can kind of see why.&lt;p&gt;Now thanks to Kickstarter &lt;i&gt;et al.&lt;/i&gt;, a developer just has to be able to say to potential fans, &amp;quot;is this a game you want?!&amp;quot; and if they say yes, they essentially pay in advance for their game. It&amp;#x27;s so direct, it&amp;#x27;s so wonderful.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there&amp;#x27;s still an element of having to sell the idea, but at least the idea is being sold to a bunch of regular folks, who have a little bit of money as opposed to somebody in charge of a large business. The decisions are much easier to make, and the risk is much lower for the investors.&lt;p&gt;I hope crowdfunding in this way isn&amp;#x27;t just a flash in the pan. I hope we continue to see projects funded in this way for a long, long time to come. Here&amp;#x27;s to another billion, Kickstarter!</text></comment>
<story><title>Kickstarter passes $1B in pledges</title><url>https://www.kickstarter.com/1billion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>toong</author><text>I skimmed over the map to find some interesting data:&lt;p&gt;* Averages are close to $200 per backer&lt;p&gt;* USA has $175 avg per backer, but makes 2&amp;#x2F;3 of that $1B&lt;p&gt;* The middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Koeweit, ..) spends $400 up to almost $800 per backer&lt;p&gt;* Antartica has 11 backers @ $337&amp;#x2F;backer :-) 4th place, after the middle east, After that, Norway ($280), Belgium ($250)&lt;p&gt;Would be interesting to plot this data against the number of citizens, so you can get a view of the participation rate of a country. (The US would top that probably at around 1%)&lt;p&gt;Edit for readability</text></comment>