Kickstarter Hits $1 Billion in Pledges, Gaming Projects Lead

The crowd-funding idea has really taken off, hasn't it?

How much money have Kickstarter projects earned overall?

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Well, the company’s freshly launched One Billion Dollars page says it all. Kickstarter has recorded its one billionth dollar pledged, and it only took four years. The site went live in April 2009 and since that time, interested participants have donated a lot of money.

However, it’s important to note that while people did indeed pledge a total of $1 billion, only $859 million are “successful dollars.” That’s not a terrible percentage, even though cynics could say that $141 million is a significant amount of unsuccessful dollars.

Kickstarter isn’t just big on the money scale; it’s also very popular, as 5.7 million individuals have contributed in these four years. It’s also very cool that the video game category is the biggest overall in terms of total dollars pledged. $215.75 million has been related to gaming, and $189.84 million were successful campaigns. However, all told, video game projects have a success rate of a little over 35 percent, the fourth worst overall, just behind Technology (just under 35 percent), Publishing (32.29 percent) and Fashion (29.3 percent).

Here are some relevant stats:

  • More than half of the $1 billion was pledged in the past 12 months.
  • Backers come from 224 countries and territories, and all seven continents.
  • US backers gave the most with $663,316,496 in total contributions to date.
  • 1,689,979 people have backed more than one project.
  • 15,932 people have backed more than 50 projects.
  • March 13, 2013 was Kickstarter’s biggest day on record when 54,187 people pledged $4,029,585.45 to 1,985 projects.
  • On the day Kickstarter launched (April 28, 2009), 40 people pledged $1,084 to seven projects.

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