Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA
NEW YORK — Kickstarter is having an amazing year, even by the standards of other white hot Web startup companies, and more is yet to come. — One of the company's three co-founders, Yancey Strickler …
Context & Ripple Effects
The claim caps a fortnight of momentum for Kickstarter: on February 9 the platform crossed a threshold as two projects each cleared $1 million in pledges within a single day, an event that also surfaced in a major political speech. Co-founder Yancey Strickler now frames that scale against public funding itself, saying Kickstarter expects to move more money to the arts than the NEA does.
The story traveled unusually wide for a startup datapoint — pickups at Popular Science, ReadWriteWeb, Game Informer, Geek.com and Kickstarter's own blog — because it lands in the middle of a broader marketplace revival: earlier corpus coverage grouped Etsy, Kickstarter and Airbnb as web marketplaces succeeding where similar ideas previously failed, and noted Kickstarter is funding product development 'uncompromised by focus groups and committees.'
First-order effects
- Artists and creative projects gain a funding channel whose volume now rivals a federal agency's entire arts budget, shifting where creators go first for support.
- Kickstarter's own revenue scales directly with pledge volume, so the record pace set by the February $1M milestones compounds its business as well as its cultural footprint.
Second-order effects
- The NEA and traditional arts funders face an uncomfortable benchmark: a commercial platform matching or exceeding their disbursements invites questions about the relevance and size of public arts funding.
- Rival crowdfunding platforms must respond to Kickstarter's scale advantage, since backer liquidity concentrates on whichever site hosts the marquee million-dollar campaigns.
Third-order effects
- If private crowdfunding keeps growing at this pace, gatekeeping over which art gets made migrates from grant committees and panels to mass backer markets — the 'no committees' model the corpus already flagged in December 2011.
- Crowdfunding becomes a measurable input to the creative economy alongside public agencies, forcing policymakers to treat backer platforms as part of the arts-funding system rather than a novelty.
The trend: Cultural funding is migrating from institutional grant-makers toward distributed backer marketplaces, with Kickstarter's pledge volume becoming a de facto national arts budget.