Here are 10 things you never knew about Kickstarter

9 Feb 2016

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter

Crowdfunding site Kickstarter reached an impressive landmark this week, with its 100,000th successfully-funded project. This inspired us to look at some of the more quirky facts about the site.

Did you know that crowdfunding can help people fall in love, combine literary geniuses with a malevolent beast that’s part octopus, part dragon, part man, and can even get you a hug?

So Kickstarter has shown, with the publication of a swathe of cool facts about it’s run on the back of the 100,000 landmark figure. Oh, by the way, the latest successful project is a look at the horrors of war, specifically the Falklands/Malvinas war.

It’s a fine project and raised $51,000, $6,000 above its target. However, today shouldn’t be just about that, it should be about the years of Kickstarter failures and triumphs that have led to such an occasion.

Kickstarter

1. Marriage

For example, did you know that there has been exactly (approximately) one marriage between a successful Kickstarter project creator and one of the project’s backers?

That’s what happened when Rebecca Schiffman’s jewellery campaign was supported by Scott Jacobson, with the pair marrying in 2014 after, thankfully, far more interaction than just an impulsive ‘yea, I’d pay $5 for this trinket’ impulse click of a mouse.

2. Shakespeare

Did you know that Shakespeare has been quite the inspiration on Kickstarter, with 274 successful campaigns being, at least in some way, inspired by the English author?

Projects like Shrunken Shakespeare’s “sexy romp through one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays”, with a 2013 performance being staged on the back of a modest $3,380 raised online.

3. Cthulu

How about Cthulhu, eh? Cthulhu-inspired projects came in at a lesser (though still impressive) figure of 170.

Kickstarter

Playing cards, dice towers, World War II retellings of Call of Cthulu, figurines, board games, artwork, more cards, decals, spaghetti days and more cards, all in honour of the weird god from beneath.

4. Shakespeare v Cthulu

Okay, let’s try and make these facts interact somehow. So, have there been any successful Shakespeare and Cthulu-related projects? Of course.

Shakespeare vs Cthulhu, an anthology of short stories based on Shakespeare’s works, and world, but with a dark Lovecraftian twist, raised £7,467 last week.

5. Hugs

The number of people who backed Marina Abramovic’s project for a hug was 1,359.

Yep, back in 2014 the Marina Abramovic Institute raised a whopping $661,452 for help with its art projects. This included a hug from Marina herself, which raised around $1,500 of the total.

6. Location

The distance between a given project’s location and one of its backers is, on average, 2,317.09 miles. By way of comparison, that is just a little less than the distance between Dublin and Cairo, as the crow flies.

7. Love or logic?

When it comes to projects that explore the head and the heart, we tend to fund the latter almost twice as much it seems (1,334 vs 758).

Kickstarter

8. Music

Music: The highest rank of a Kickstarter-funded album on the Billboard 200 is 7. Pretty impressive, but how about the four creators who have successfully funded their campaigns through Kickstarter who have then won a Grammy.

9. A little help

The likelihood is that if you have a project that raises the amount you were looking for, you’ll probably back at least one other campaign. In fact, more than 70pc of successful creators do so.