Fastest projects to reach 1 million U.S. dollars in crowdfunding on Kickstarter as of November 2016 (in hours:minutes)

This statistic shows information on some of the fastest project launches on crowdfunding website Kickstarter as of November 2016, based on the amount of time several million dollar projects took to surpass the 1 million dollar funding mark. On Black Friday 2016, board game Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, a follow-up to the 2012 game Kingdom Death, generated 1 million U.S. dollars in pledges within 19 minutes. On February 23, 2015, smartwatch Pebble Time surpassed the 1 million U.S. dollar mark within 49 minutes. The Veronica Mars movie project had been the fastest Kickstarter movie project to accumulate 1 million U.S. dollars, taking only 4 hours and 24 minutes to do so. The fastest gaming project to reach 1 million U.S. dollars in funding was Shenmue 3 as of June 2015.

Successful Kickstarter campaigns - additional information

As of 2015, Kickstarter is one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world, having reportedly received more than 1.6 billion U.S. dollars in pledges from 8.9 million individuals since its 2009 launch. According to industry experts, global crowdfunding campaigns have raised a total of 16.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2014, a 167 percent growth from the previous year’s 6.1 billion. In 2015, the industry is expected to reach 34.4 billion U.S. dollars in pledges from all over the world. However, crowdfunding, financing of a project through small donations from a great number of individuals, is not in itself a new idea and has been used in history before. A notable example is the completion of the Statue of Liberty, which was backed by more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar, following a campaign initiated by famed journalist Joseph Pulitzer.

While other websites, such as GoFundMe, allow people to raise money for anything from graduations to medical bills, trips or charity, Kickstarter focuses on mainly creative projects, from craft ideas to music albums or technological innovations. As of June 2015, the most popular category of projects featured on the platform is games, with some 360 million U.S. dollars pledged, followed by technology, design, film & video, and music. As of April 2015, some 38 percent of the campaigns posted on Kickstarter have reached or even exceeded their funding goal. The most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time is the one supporting Pebble Time, a smartwatch developed by Pebble Technology Corporation, which had an initial fundraising target of 100 thousand U.S. dollars, but received pledges worth over 10 million U.S. dollars from almost 70 thousand backers. It is also the campaign fastest to reach pledges worth 1 million U.S. dollars, in a record 30 minutes. The popular smartwatch went into production and was released in 2013, selling its one millionth unit in December 2014.