Past and Future of Crowdfunding
Perry Chen
Yancey Stricler
Charles Adler
These names may not sound familiar to you. But if I say Pebble, one of the first smart watches, or the famous virtual reality game kit, Oculus Rift, and if I say that these three people are the founders of Kickstarter, which provides crowd funding for such projects, I have no doubt that many of you will be pleased to know.
Of course, the history of the story goes back to ancient times. In the 1800s, with the USA not meeting the money for the base to be established for the construction of the Statue of Liberty, Joseph Pulitzer is involved in this process. By launching the world's most effective crowdfunding campaign, Pulitzer, over The New York World newspaper, it collects $160,000 in donations in 5 months. And we find ourselves watching that famous statue as the symbol of all American movies.
With the 90s, events where various artists collect donations from their fans began to take place, and in 2006, for the first time, Michael Sullivan introduced the crowdfunding discourse into the literature with a video blog project that he tried to raise funds for, but failed.
At the beginning of the 2000s, in another part of the world, Perry Chen was constantly confronted with the difficulties and risks for artists to earn money as a musician. He wanted artists to perform according to the rate of support they received, instead of making risky investments to exhibit their performances, or to perform their art with minimum risk. In this way, those who will buy the artist's tickets would also guarantee their payments without encountering last-minute surprises. It was obvious that there were thousands of artists who had problems in this way.
As of 2007, Chen came together with Yancey Stricler and Charles Adler, respectively, and took action with the idea of turning this problem into a crowdfunding model. When it comes to software and design, they launched the Kickstarter online platform in 2009 with the support of their first investors and the famous artist Tobias Fünke. With the cancellation of some popular events taking place at the same time, viewers and artists' belief that they can show their fans the power to not let the events they want be blocked has grown even more.
But it should not be assumed that as they established the platform, creative projects were quickly launched and garnered the necessary support. At that time, the term crowdfunding was not even spoken, or anyone had any idea who would use such a thing. The fact that interesting projects and ideas could be funded by the masses just by sticking to their imaginations emerged.
In fact, let me share with you the first Kickstarter projects:
“Grace Jones Does Not Give A Fuck.” project, one of which needed $1,000 support but could not complete it
The other one is "Drawing for Dollars", which needs 20 dollars support and collects 35 dollars from 3 people. Be sure to take a look.
Even today, mostly projects seeking support are under $10,000. Kickstarter boomed within three years of its founding. The first million dollar project was with the Elevation Dock, which is the "best dock for iPhones". More than 12,000 backers gave a million dollars to see it produced. The second project was the project of a game developer in the same period. Donations were requested for an online platform that wanted to be prepared for the game called Broken age. This project showed that there are people who don't just give money to the game, but are willing to pay for the game to be included in their world. More than $3 million in funding was covered by the players. In fact, the game category is the most funded category on Kickstarter as of today, with over $1 billion in new game projects being funded. It has become much more possible to make a difficult and costly process such as game creation real with a few hundred supporters.
Kickstarter, now in its 10th year, started its journey as a closed-invitation community and has done a great job by raising more than $4 billion online from supporters of different demographics around the world to finance creative projects and support new business start-ups. Along with the creative projects that Turkish entrepreneurs such as Ercan Erciyes funded successful projects such as Monument, there were also projects that ended in disappointment. Millions of supporters, who had the luxury of deciding what was worth funding and what was useless, found a completely different experience in their hands.
Crowdfunding platforms such as Arıkovanı, fongogo, and fundbulucu are also becoming widespread in Turkey and gather thousands of people in one place to support creative bodies. I even had the chance to be an active supporter on these platforms thanks to the short film projects of my graduate teacher, Mehmet Tığlı, and I witnessed that the projects I supported returned with awards from international festivals. The experience I had and the effect of the results were motivating for me to use the platforms actively. This had such a sustainable impact that people who created projects to finance a sailing trip around the world like Emily Richmond realized their dreams.
Crowdfunding has not only made it easier to finance all kinds of projects, but has become a very important branch for creative bodies, from movie projects that will even be nominated for an Oscar with the support of the masses, to the idea of building a Robocop statue in Detroit. Let's not forget that 16 million world citizens support the projects through Kickstarter alone, and more than 5 billion dollars of funds have been collected only through another crowdfunding platform, gofundme.
Bonus:
The most popular crowdfunding platforms and comparisons posted on crowdfunding.com:
