[waterlesscloud]

I expect other players to come in for big name creatives. Maybe the Hollywood agencies, CAA for example. Or maybe the creatives themselves set up their own infrastructure.

Say Joss Whedon wanted to raise $10 million for a show. With Kickstarter he'd have to give them $500,000 of that, and it's not at all apparent that he would actually need them. If you had an agency roll this into existing services, maybe with a nominal fee, the big names may be more comfortable with that anyway...

[jerf]

"With Kickstarter [Joss Whedon]'d have to give them $500,000 of that, and it's not at all apparent that he would actually need them."

I'm not sure it was possible to pick a worse example. Dr. Horrible is quite possibly the Hollywood project most desperately calling out for fan funding that has ever actually been made, and it was still only made because he just put up the money and hoped for the best. Concrete evidence would suggest that he's not capable of raising millions of dollars from fans without some assistance, because if he could have, he would have then.

Using the Wasteland 2 average donation of call-it-$50 ($47.86), is $500,000 that excessive for coordinating and aggregating the donations of 200,000 people? That's not free. Joss can't avoid paying something for that service. Perhaps someday they'll move to taking a flat fee per donation, though that would also require Amazon and the other payment processors Kickstarter uses to go to flat fees too, which seems unlikely.

[waterlesscloud]

That was 2008, an entirely different time. Crowdfunding barely existed as a concept and to my knowledge it was never Wedon's plan to pursue it.

I'll draw your attention to the fact that the big videogame kickstarters have been for franchises that have been dormant for decades. Surely their principals wanted to bring them back sooner. If they could raise this kind of money, why didn't they do it in 2008? The answer, of course, is that they couldn't do it in 2008. But they can in 2012. And Whedon could in 2012 as well.

[jerf]

Your logic doesn't follow, because "they did in 2012"... with Kickstarter. I don't deny that Whedon could do it in 2012... with Kickstarter.

For that matter he may even be able to do it himself, but my point is and remains that he's going to spend money on the collection and that he's at best only going to do incrementally better than Kickstart prices, not wildly better. And he'll probably have a hard time even doing that well.

[waterlesscloud]

My point is that for big established names Kickstarter doesn't add value, it merely provides a service. One which can (and undoubtedly will) be provided by others.

If they have competition as a service, then they will likely have to compete on price as well.

[goatforce5]

I have no idea how the traditional Hollywood system works, but if Whedon raised $10m from a studio via an agent and, I dunno, a production house or something, how many middle men would get their fees from that $10m and what would it add up to?

[bproper]

Joss Whedon might be able to raise the money on his own due to his exceptional internat fame, but for most indie producers, the incumbent system takes a way bigger slice of the pie than 5%.

[waterlesscloud]

The traditional system would eat up a big chunk, as would agents. Whedon might be able to raise funds directly from a hedge fund or rich individual, that's what indie producers do when they can.

[sycr]

I think that you might be discounting the value of Kickstarter's execution - or rather, a hypothetical Joss Whedon would be discounting the value of their execution.

In the same way that Twitter is "just a database of SMS messages", Kickstarter is just a "payment checkout" - but of course they are both greater than the sum of their parts.

[waterlesscloud]

They have value, of course. But I do think that on the upper end they might be forced to lower their percentage in time. If for no other reason than someone else will come along and compete at a lower rate.

Their execution isn't that hard to compete with, it can be commoditized with enough resources, and for someone with actual fame I don't think they increase the amount raised by much.

If not Whedon, think Lady Gaga or JK Rowling. What would Kickstarter offer them that some private white label processing service couldn't copy?

[ScottBurson]

Right. What you have to look at is, how much more money would he bring in by using Kickstarter? Hard to say for sure, of course, but Kickstarter is in a very good position now to argue that it's well over 5%.

Seems to me that for someone who doesn't already have a large fan base, a Kickstarter campaign could easily increase their take by a factor of 4 (if not 10 or 100 or 1000). For someone well-known like Whedon the factor will be smaller, but if it's 1.5 or even 1.2, the 5% fee is more than covered.

[shawnc]

It's not apparent he would need Kickstarter - he could attempt a crowdfund straight through his own website, thus not giving anyone else a cut except whoever his payment provider is. He'd certainly drive enough traffic there, to not require any 'help' from Kickstarter.