How much money would you guess the Internet has collectively thrown at Kickstarter?
Don’t bother whipping out the ol’ graphing calculator — Kickstarter actually shares that number regularly. Sometime quite soon, Kickstarter will surpass $1 billion dollars pledged.
This comes from Kickstarter’s own statistics page, where the company regularly provides a breakdown of where the money is going on the site. As of this morning, Kickstarter has seen $999,209,752 dollars pledged to projects — or roughly $791K shy of the big B. They’ll likely pass the billion mark some time in the next few days.
One thing worth noting: this is dollars pledged across “Successfully Funded” projects, projects in progress, and those that didn’t meet their final goal. On Kickstarter, pledged money is only received if the campaign’s target goal is met. Kickstarter says that, of the billion dollars pledged overall, $858M has been pledged to successfully funded projects.
Other interesting stats that can be gleaned from the page:
- 135,270 campaigns have launched on Kickstarter
- Of those, 57,052 (43%) reached their funding goal. Of the larger chunk that does not succeed, 10% of those didn’t receive a single dollar.
- While the “Games” category is only ranked sixth in terms of number of successfully funded projects (after Music, Film, Art, Publishing, and Theater), it has by far the most campaigns that have raised over $1M, and its campaigns have collectively raised more than any other category.
- If your campaign can raise 20% of its goal, it’s 80% more likely to succeed.
(For the curious: Kickstarter takes a 5% cut of successful campaigns. I promised you wouldn’t need your calculator, so: on the $858M that has been pledged to successful projects at this point, that’s $42 million or so that went to Kickstarter.)