Who Rules The Crowdfunding Roost?

Indiegogo is a well known pioneer in the world of crowdfunding launched back in 2008.In particular, those fundraising campaigns which support humanitarian, environmental, or other more altruistic endeavors frequently find a home on Indiegogo. Its global platform lends itself to crowdfunding campaigns the world over, and at present Indiegogo holds the distinction of hosting the highest crowdfunded total on the web, successful or not.

While establishing their presence mostly for people who have been affected by physical or financial hardship, GoFundMe has raised over $370m during its existence, primarily for causes and people instead of products. Although, Indiegogo campaigns have raised substantially more, the crowdfunding pioneer is poised for a substantial growth with $40 million venture capital raised in its latest round of funding.

THE LATEST: The daily rankings at Crowdocracy released today indicate that GoFundMe has surpassed and replaced its global and US rank from #3 to #2 at the Crowdocracy Global rankings and Crowdocracy US rankings pushing Indiegogo to third position. Crowdocracy Global ranking is estimated by averaging the global web traffic reported by Alexa and Similarweb, while Crowdocracy US ranking is the average of US web traffic as measured by Alexa, Compete and Similarweb. Outranking of Indiegogo by GoFundMe comes as a bit of surprise to most of us in the crowdfunding industry.

PREDICTIONS: While GoFundMe’s lead over Indiegogo in US ranking is sizeable, its Global lead is razor thin and it’ll not be too surprising if it’s edged out very soon by cash-rich Indiegogo. With rest of the crowdfunding sites way behind, Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe are expected to keep ruling the crowdfunding roost at least for the rest of 2014.

Keep yourself updated. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive up-to-date information and the latest news, rankings, etc delivered right to your inbox!

"Shut up and take my money!" – The crowdfunding insanity!

“Shut up and take my money.” Well I didn’t say that. That’s exactly what a gaming fan (Eurogamer reader Arcam  http://kck.st/zHkxwF ) told  a game developer who is turning out to be the next big success on Kickstarter after Double Fine’s $3.3 million haul. The best part is, in the campaign video, Brian Fargo, the man behind the Wasteland 2 crowdfunding campaign, told the audience, how miserably he failed to convince the gaming investors/publishers to fund his project. In essence, confessing  the audience that no traditional gaming industry insider of present time would touch his project with a ten foot pole. Conventional wisdom told me that his confession would deter me from putting my 2 cents in his project turned down by the established video game sponsors. Yet, the crowd went gung-ho over his Wasteland 2 idea. Within just 48 hours of the campaign, they gave him more than he wanted. And, the money keeps pouring in as we speak.

So what is the moral of the story? As much as it is scientifically established that much of human behavior is predictable, one would expect the crowd to be a cumulative aggregate of that prediction. Wrong!! The crowd psyche is unpredictable. As it stands today, crowd economy is heading northward; just impossible to predict the extent of its economic impact on entrepreneurship with any certainty. At least, it’s beyond me.