Kickstarter hits over US$1bn in pledges

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has reached over US$1 billion in pledges — and over half of that was made in the last 12 months.

Kickstarter has announced a massive milestone: on 3 March, the crowdfunding website reached over US$1 billion in pledges from over 5.7 million backers from around the world.

Although Kickstarter has been around since April 2009, more than half of that money was made in just the last 12 months. According to Kickstarter's 2013 year in review, three million backers pledged over US$480 million for the entirety of 2013, which means that project backing is on the rise.

The US is the biggest funder, pledging US$663,316,496, followed by the UK at US$54,427,475, and Canada at US$44,913,678. Australia comes in fourth at US$31,776,566 from 109,456 backers.

And 62 per cent of that money — US$619 million — was made from people who backed more than one project.

Kickstarter also noted that Wednesday is, on average, the day of the week on which people pledge the most, and the highest amount of money was raised on 13 March 2013, when backers pledged US$4,029,585.45 to 1985 projects.

As of time of writing, the rate of success on Kickstarter was 43.55 per cent, and the most popular category was games, bringing in US$216.35 million across 8787 projects. As the website grows in popularity, though, we do expect to see that success rate decline a little. Kickstarter does its best to minimise the number of creators who would use the site as easy money, but the more users there are, the more difficult that will become.