The internet has now thrown a billion dollars at Kickstarter

Kickstarter has given us a lot of very cool things: the Pebble smartwatch and an Oscar-winning documentary short for instance. The cumulative cost of bringing all that stuff to life? One-billion dollars.

Actually, the crowdfunding site’s stats put it at a little under that with US$999 945 521 pledged to date. In turn, those dollars have funded 57 118 successful projects.

While we all naturally get excited when we hear the word “billion”, that actually means that the average cost of each successfully completed project is comparatively low. Indeed, Kickstarter says that most successfully funded projects raise less than US$10 000, although a “growing number” have reached six and even seven figures.

There are however quite a substantial number of projects on the platform that have not received full funding. Of all the projects to have been put on Kickstarter, around 43% of them have been funded successfully.

It’s worth bearing in mind however that Kickstarter does not count funding projects that have reached their goals as successfully funded — only projects whose funding is complete.

That said, there were always bound to be a few flops on the platform. According to Kickstarter, 10% of projects finished having never received a single pledge. The margin for success though is pretty narrow. Around 80% of projects that raised more than 20% of their goal were successfully funded.

As TechCrunch’s Greg Kumparak notes, the five percent cut TechCrunch takes on successful pledges means that its banked around US$42-million on the US$858-million paid toward successful projects.