Kickstarter

= people pledge money for projects to happen. If the money is raised, the project happens, and the people who pledge get what they've been promised.

URL = http://Kickstarter.com

Description

"Kickstarter lets donors fund art shows, movies, short films, dance, graphic novels and theatre productions. It helped Diaspora, an open-source social-networking project, raise $200,000 during the recent controversy over Facebook’s privacy policies. IndieGogo supports filmmakers, writers and game designers. Some sites specialise: Sellaband helps bands raise money to fund professional recording of albums, and Spot.us raises money for journalistic projects.

Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter’s chief community officer, says the firm accepts about half the projects submitted to it. “We turn down projects that are charity, that are just straight business expenses, or ‘my dog has cancer’,” he says. Of those that are accepted, about half meet their funding goals: around 1,600 projects had been funded by July 2010.

Crowdfunding firms typically take a 5% commission and charge a 3-4% payment-processing fee." (http://www.economist.com/node/16909869?story_id=16909869&CFID=149765222&CFTOKEN=41065834)