Kickstarter Expands Crowdfunding Model To UK-Based Projects

14 January 2013

Kickstarter, the perceived champion of crowd-sourced funding has launched in the UK, and is hoping for more successful projects powered by fans. Strictly speaking, today is the day that people can start backing projects in the UK, as the site allowed UK-based projects to start registering earlier this month so they would have a good cross-section of projects on show.

UK users of Kickstarter have been able to fund projects based in the UK before now, but the ability to host any project based outside the US has not been available. In that sense the UK is the next big step, but one where a lot of groundwork in terms of visibility and awareness has already been generated.

That should ensure that the Kickstarter team see a lot of projects, a lot of people leveraging their social networks, and many projects reaching their funding goal. As always, Kickstarter will charge successfully funded projects 5% of the final amount raised.

The last few months have seen some tricky challenges for Kickstarter, mostly around the issue of the funding of projects that fail to deliver, but they continue to push forward and expand. It will be interesting to see if projects launched in the UK will be as well-received as those in the US… and how Kickstarter will handle the fallout of any particularly high-profile projects.