This is very cool. Kickstarter is the leading edge of a tectonic shift.
Quite often with these new ideas that come out of left field, the pendulum swings the other way after a certain point. While I like Kickstarter and other such projects (a lot of cool gizmos would not see the light of day were it not for Kickstarter), I fully expect the next year or so to be peppered with reports about fraud, etc. in the popular media.
It used to be that if you had a widget that you wanted built at scale, you had 2 options: mortgage the house (and bug the relatives for cash), or approach one of the big guys and beg them for help. With Kickstarter, you don't need the big guys anymore. And as with any other such change where the Old Guard gets sidetracked, expect them to fight back with scare stories and mockery.
If they wanted to, Kickstarter could be one the biggest and best platform for startup crowd funding. They have the infrastructure to capture the promise of the JOBS act/ crowd funding act
I expect other players to come in for big name creatives. Maybe the Hollywood agencies, CAA for example. Or maybe the creatives themselves set up their own infrastructure.
Say Joss Whedon wanted to raise $10 million for a show. With Kickstarter he'd have to give them $500,000 of that, and it's not at all apparent that he would actually need them. If you had an agency roll this into existing services, maybe with a nominal fee, the big names may be more comfortable with that anyway...
"With Kickstarter [Joss Whedon]'d have to give them $500,000 of that, and it's not at all apparent that he would actually need them."
I'm not sure it was possible to pick a worse example. Dr. Horrible is quite possibly the Hollywood project most desperately calling out for fan funding that has ever actually been made, and it was still only made because he just put up the money and hoped for the best. Concrete evidence would suggest that he's not capable of raising millions of dollars from fans without some assistance, because if he could have, he would have then.
Using the Wasteland 2 average donation of call-it-$50 ($47.86), is $500,000 that excessive for coordinating and aggregating the donations of 200,000 people? That's not free. Joss can't avoid paying something for that service. Perhaps someday they'll move to taking a flat fee per donation, though that would also require Amazon and the other payment processors Kickstarter uses to go to flat fees too, which seems unlikely.
I have no idea how the traditional Hollywood system works, but if Whedon raised $10m from a studio via an agent and, I dunno, a production house or something, how many middle men would get their fees from that $10m and what would it add up to?
I think that you might be discounting the value of Kickstarter's execution - or rather, a hypothetical Joss Whedon would be discounting the value of their execution.
In the same way that Twitter is "just a database of SMS messages", Kickstarter is just a "payment checkout" - but of course they are both greater than the sum of their parts.
It's not apparent he would need Kickstarter - he could attempt a crowdfund straight through his own website, thus not giving anyone else a cut except whoever his payment provider is. He'd certainly drive enough traffic there, to not require any 'help' from Kickstarter.
[+] [-] ajays|14 years ago|reply
Quite often with these new ideas that come out of left field, the pendulum swings the other way after a certain point. While I like Kickstarter and other such projects (a lot of cool gizmos would not see the light of day were it not for Kickstarter), I fully expect the next year or so to be peppered with reports about fraud, etc. in the popular media.
It used to be that if you had a widget that you wanted built at scale, you had 2 options: mortgage the house (and bug the relatives for cash), or approach one of the big guys and beg them for help. With Kickstarter, you don't need the big guys anymore. And as with any other such change where the Old Guard gets sidetracked, expect them to fight back with scare stories and mockery.
[+] [-] olalonde|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cienrak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citadrianne|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|14 years ago|reply
Say Joss Whedon wanted to raise $10 million for a show. With Kickstarter he'd have to give them $500,000 of that, and it's not at all apparent that he would actually need them. If you had an agency roll this into existing services, maybe with a nominal fee, the big names may be more comfortable with that anyway...
[+] [-] jerf|14 years ago|reply
I'm not sure it was possible to pick a worse example. Dr. Horrible is quite possibly the Hollywood project most desperately calling out for fan funding that has ever actually been made, and it was still only made because he just put up the money and hoped for the best. Concrete evidence would suggest that he's not capable of raising millions of dollars from fans without some assistance, because if he could have, he would have then.
Using the Wasteland 2 average donation of call-it-$50 ($47.86), is $500,000 that excessive for coordinating and aggregating the donations of 200,000 people? That's not free. Joss can't avoid paying something for that service. Perhaps someday they'll move to taking a flat fee per donation, though that would also require Amazon and the other payment processors Kickstarter uses to go to flat fees too, which seems unlikely.
[+] [-] goatforce5|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sycr|14 years ago|reply
In the same way that Twitter is "just a database of SMS messages", Kickstarter is just a "payment checkout" - but of course they are both greater than the sum of their parts.
[+] [-] shawnc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonursenbach|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draggnar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bizodo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bproper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronnier|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|14 years ago|reply