Kickstarter Campaigns Raised $319 Million in 2012

Funded everything from tech innovation to comedy shows

While Kickstarter's hardware projects made headlines in 2012, film and gaming ideas (of both the video and board variety) were the real cash magnets for the crowdfunding site, raising a combined $176 million.

That's just one of the many stats Kickstarter recently released on its crowdfunding activity in 2012, arguably the year the online service, and the notion of crowdfunding, went mainstream. In 2012 Kickstarter attracted more than 2 million backers who pledged a combined $319 million on everything from one-woman comedy shows to iPhone-enabled watches and electronic banana pianos. The money total blew away 2011 by 221 percent, and the number of backers grew a corresponding 238 percent.

But just because a campaign launched didn't mean it was successful, in fact, it got harder as the year went on (especially for hardware projects), both by Kickstarter's design and as the public wised up to beautiful-looking renderings of gadgets that would never get shipped. Of the 41,765 projects launched on Kickstarter, only 18,109 campaigns (about 43 percent) were successful.