The generalist platforms have the biggest turnover, and capture the majority of value in terms of both number of projects submitted and amounts raised—Indiegogo and Kickstarter in the US, Ulule and KissKissBankBank in France. Kickstarter, the world leader, has raised \$4,090,777,676 across a total of 157,152 projects funded. The figures are lower in France: Ulule reports 26,261 projects funded out of 40,643 submitted, generating donations amounting to €129,564,662 since the platform’s launch. KissKissBankBank raised €93,488,678, with 33,175 projects proposed, 19,349 of which were successful.
The dominance of generalist platforms is due both to thematic categorizations (close, if not identical, to those of the cultural and creative industries: music, comics, publishing, films and documentaries, videogames, technology, cookery), and to their media coverage and trust they generate. This observation is corroborated by the statistics of the research we carried out with Internet users, project creators and backers. To the question ‘Can you cite any crowdfunding platforms?’ respondents to our study mostly named Ulule (27%), KissKiss-BankBank (22%), Leetchi (13%) and Kickstarter (9%).
More specifically, regarding the projects submitted on the majority of platforms, music appears to account for a significant proportion of revenues. The importance of music can be explained partly by the ties that this art form has with crowdfunding from the beginning, but also because of the correspondence between musical formats, as an experience good, with this type of apparatus (Bourreau and Gensollen 2006)—unlike other areas such as documentary or fiction film, whose products both require significantly larger budgets and often rely on diverse sources of funding. Lastly, this importance can be linked to the structure of the musical sector and the evolution of usages in the digital age (Leguern 2016). For instance, considering the figures of US platform Kickstarter, in June 2019, music isn’t generating the most projects but it remains the category where there are the most fully funded projects.
Far from an Alternative: Intermediation Apparatuses
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