Study: Kickstarter has created 8.8K companies, 29.6K full-time jobs, and $5.3B for project owners and their communities
A new study by the University of Pennsylvania provides the first comprehensive look at how the Kickstarter community impacts the creative economy. The study finds that Kickstarter projects have:
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2016 Kickstarter had already stacked up scale markers: it passed $2B in total pledges the previous November and crossed 100,000 successfully funded campaigns that February. What was missing was an answer to the question critics kept asking — does any of this translate into real companies and jobs, or just funded prototypes?
First-order effects
- Kickstarter now has third-party validation from the University of Pennsylvania — 8,800 companies, 29,600 full-time jobs, $5.3B generated — that reframes it from a pledge platform into measurable creative-economy infrastructure, useful in fundraising, policy conversations, and creator recruitment.
Second-order effects
- Category-level claims get easier to defend: games, already Kickstarter's biggest category at $412.4M by late 2015, could later be framed as a $1B+ cumulative channel for creators, and the company's push into recurring revenue with Drip subscriptions leans directly on the creator-economy case this study supplies.
Third-order effects
- If platforms keep commissioning academic impact studies, crowdfundings' success metric shifts from dollars pledged toward jobs and firms created — making independent economic audits a standard part of how marketplace platforms argue for their place in the economy.
The trend: Crowdfunding is maturing from a novelty funding channel into a quantified segment of the creative economy, with platforms seeking academic validation of their downstream economic footprint.