News You Can Bruise for 2011 December 19

Mon Dec 19 2011 11:39 Month of Crowdfunding: Hey there. Readers know that I backed a lot of Kickstarter projects this year (182, to be exact), but I've also dabbled in other crowdfunding websites. I mostly use Kickstarter because their site is by far the easiest to use, but my loyalty is to interesting projects, not to the hosting site.

There are a buttload of these sites, so with one exception I'm only going to list the ones I've used. Let me know if you've had good experiences with any others, on the money-raising side or the funding side.

• Kiva is not quite like other crowdfunding sites because a) it's a charity, b) you're making a no-interest loan that gets repaid, and c) despite what the interface implies, the loans have already been made and you're actually loaning to the intermediaries who made those original loans. But, it was the first crowdfunding site I ever used, and I think its easy-to-use design inspired Kickstarter's design.
• I've funded a couple projects on IndieGoGo, but only when I find out about a specific project through some other mechanism, because IndieGoGo makes it even more difficult than Kickstarter does to see all the new projects. Of all these sites, I think IndieGoGo offers the strongest competition to Kickstarter.
• I funded several of the SciFund Challenge projects on Rockethub, but their site is confusing as hell, so I haven't used it apart from that. Bizarre metaphors like "Fuelpad" abound, and neologisms like "Creatives" are used in a way that makes me think the site's run by Jack Donaghy. A lot of this design is explained by the hypothesis that the site was designed to appeal to those who want to start a project (aka Creatives), not to people who want to fund.
• 8-Bit Funding is a video-game-specific crowdfunding site. I haven't used it because I couldn't find any games that I'd be able to play once they were released.

OK, I think that's enough crowdfunding stuff on this weblog for 2011. Notwithstanding that we already have enough, I'm going to post one more entry, about the Street Performer Protocol.