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Strickler, who co-founded the original crowd funders with Charles Adler and Perry Chen in 2009 past the magic billion-dollar figure earlier this week.
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Yancey Strickler, CEO and co-founder of Kickstarter has seen his company pass through a major milestone with the news that we have succeeded in raising more than $1 billion in pledges.
Even more encouraging for Strickler is the fact that more than half of the $1 billion raised by Kickstarter two men during the last 12 months, ample proof that the crowd funding concept which he has been a key pioneer of has become very much a part of life on the corporate landscape.
Unlike other crowd funding platforms, Kickstarter has consistently operated on an all-or-nothing, which means that if a particular project does not reach its funding target , , anyone who has pledged money will have a totally refunded.
According to figures released by Kickstarter, the billion dollars in funding came from a total of 5.7 million people who have invested pledges in a large variety of enterprises including movies, games and a variety of diverse creative projects.
Currently the United States leads the way with regards to the amount of money pledged, with almost two thirds of the billion dollars coming from the, with other major sources of investment coming from the United Kingdom and Canada. Since its founding in 2009 Kickstarter has accepted pledges from a total of 224 countries and territories drawn from each of the seven continents of the world, according to a company statement.
The statement went on to add that close to 1.7 million members of the global public have pledged money to more than one project on Kickstarter, while an outstandingly high figure of 16, 000 are reported to have backed a minimum of 50 projects on the platform.
Among the landmark projects that Kickstarter has been a major force in helping them receive funding, the one that stands out the most was for the Pebble company whose E-Paper Watch succeeded in raising just over $10 million which still remains most highly funded project in the company’s history to date.
Despite the success of the Pebble E-Paper Watch, according to Yancey Strickler, the Games category on Kickstarter remains the most active overall in terms of pledges, with around $215 million being broken pledges for gaming-related Kickstarters, with $190 million being pledged to campaigns which got off the ground, despite the fact gaming projects on Kickstarter do not enjoy a particularly healthy success rate.
In order to finance its operations Kickstarter takes 5% of the funds pledged, while Amazon, who handles the transfer of investment funds take a handling charge which runs between 3–5%.
As well as being Cofounder of Kickstarter, Inc. Yancey Strickler also serves as Editor-in-Chief of EMusic.com Inc. whose writing appeared in The Village Voice, New York magazine, Pitchfork and other publications.
