Gareth Everard has an interesting article on TechCrunch discussing what he believes crowdfunding will look like in the near future.
The golden age of irrational exuberance on Kickstarter has ended — Pebble is shutting down, marking the fall of crowdfunding's white knight after a string of other high-profile closures and failures.
Originally positioned as a medium for (especially arts-related) projects to garner modest seed funding from a diverse group of supporters, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have obviously evolved since their respective launches in 2009 and 2008. Yes, crowdfunding has produced some inspiring success stories that have grown into innovative businesses, like Peak Design and Flow Hive.
However, it also has facilitated the transfer of significant sums of money to teams that ultimately proved themselves to be incompetent, leaving backers with nothing. Recent headlines have been chock full of projects that have declared bankruptcy or otherwise betrayed their early backers, exposing cases where founders' and companies' egos have simply overtaken their ability to reason, plan and communicate logically or truthfully.
Have the high profile failures doomed crowdfunding?
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday January 24 2017, @11:34AM
There's always patreon.com. That seems to be filling the niche of patronage rather well.