Total amount of funding pledged on Kickstarter 2012-2024

Between July 2012 and September 2024, the cumulative amount of dollars pledged to project funding on Kickstarter worldwide grew consistently. By September 2024, the total value of pledges had surpassed 8.25 billion U.S. dollars. The most successful project to date was "Surprise! Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson", which collected more than 41 million U.S. dollars in 2022.

When did crowdfunding start?

In the early 2000s, one of the first internet crowdfunding platforms, ArtistShare, was launched in the United States. The platform primarily aimed to help musicians fund their artistic projects, such as albums or tours, with financial support from their fans. Following ArtistShare's success, similar crowdfunding websites emerged globally, and their numbers steadily grew over the years. By 2023, Germany, a leading European crowdfunding hub, had over 100 crowdfunding platforms in operation. 

Kickstarter

Kickstarter, which launched in 2009, is one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world, having launched over 639,000 projects and received pledges worth more than 8.25 billion U.S. dollars as of September 2024. Unlike other crowdfunding companies, Kickstarter focuses on mainly creative projects, from craft ideas to music albums or technological innovations, and imposes a time limit for each campaign. If the project fails to reach its funding goal, it is dropped and the pledges are returned to the backers. According to statistics released by Kickstarter, the success rate of fully funding a project on the crowdfunding website was only 41 percent. The largest number of successful campaigns have raised between 1,000 and 9,999 dollars, although a select 850 campaigns have managed to raise over one million U.S. dollars.