Indiegogo
is a well-known crowdfunding website, only behind Kickstarter in popularity. On the surface, Indiegogo is very similar to Kickstarter; however, unlike its rival, which is restricted to creative projects, Indiegogo is a more general-purpose platform, and users can raise funds for almost any legitimate purpose, including charitynote and starting a business.
Indiegogo has two funding models: fixed and flexible. The former is similar to Kickstarter's All or Nothing model, where the campaign must reach its goal before the end date, otherwise the campaign won't receive any funding. The latter allows users to keep whatever contributions they have attained; however, if the campaign does not meet its defined goal, Indiegogo takes a higher percentagenote . Additionally, if a user offers perks in a flexible funding campaign, they must still fulfill those promises even if they do not reach their intended target. Fixed funding is intended for creative projects and most business startups whereas flexible funding is intended for charity campaigns.
Like Kickstarter, Indiegogo has hosted several noteworthy campaigns:
- "An Hour of Code for Every Student" raised $5 million to promote teaching computer science in school.
- Apparitional: A Horror Movie about ghost hunters meeting real ghosts in a prison.
- Ato: A 2D Metroidvania Platform Game that tells its story with no words.
- Calico (2020): A Superhero Comic Book about a vigilante dealing brutal justice to animal abusers.
- Dragon's Lair Returns: an animated pitch presentation by Don Bluth for his upcoming Dragon's Lair movie which had been in
Development Hell for years. - Indiegogo's most successful campaign to date is the "Flow Hive" honeybee hive, which raised over $12.1 million against a target amount of $70,000.
- Hullabaloo, a series of 2D animated shorts created mainly by veteran Disney animators intended to preserve and bring attention to the art of traditional animation in theaters. The campaign was a rousing success, earning almost half a million dollars of its original $80,000 goal, and also bringing hope for many fans of the medium for a full theatrical film.
- Indivisible, a Action RPG by Lab Zero Games, is the first Indiegogo video game campaign to make over $1,000,000. It had a goal of $1.5 million dollars and required an extension to meet its goal, which it did with 2-3 days left.
- Jawbreakers: Lost Souls: Originally this was supposed to be a minor project with the creator expecting to just sell a few hundred copies. Thanks to an overwhelming amount of backlash from several big names in the comic industry it went on to become one of the most controversial things to happen in the medium in the last decade with several shops outright refusing to stock (or even special order) it due to their dislike of the author.
As a result the book managed to raise well over a quarter of a million dollars almost overnight (nearly 4000% of its intended goal) and sell thousands of copies. - Rooster Teeth Productions held a campaign to fund the production of their first-ever feature film, Lazer Team. Its goal was $650,000, but their fans' support was great enough that it eventually raised $2,480,334 by the end, becoming (at the time) Indiegogo's most successful fully-funded campaign. Today, it is #5 overall in fully-funded campaigns, and is still most successful film campaign on the site.
- Matthew Inman, aka The Oatmeal, hosted two successful Indiegogo campaigns. The first raised $220,000 split between the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation as a response to a lawsuit brought against him by content aggregator site FunnyJunk. The other campaign raised over $1.3 million to save Nikola Tesla's laboratory and build a museum dedicated to Tesla's work.
- Red Xmas used both Indiegogo and Kickstarter to fund it.
- Samurai Chef
- Broken Lizard held a campaign to finance the production of the Super Troopers sequel, hitting their $2 million goal in just a little over the first day and ultimately reaching over $4 million.
- Them's Fightin' Herds: A Fighting Game that started life as a fangame of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was then hit with a Cease and Desist by Hasbro. Lauren Faust stepped in to create new characters and retool the game into a brand new game with original characters. It managed to meet and surpass all the announced stretch goals at $587,026.
- Thin Blue Line: A Pro-Police Comic Book by Mike Baron, who turned to this website, and Kickstarter, for funding.
- Thom Feeney started a campaign to bail out Greece, setting his target at a record breaking 1.6 billion Eurosnote . The campaign only raised roughly 2 million Eurosnote by over 108,000 backers before the project was closed.
- Tower, an animated documentary on the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting. The film's production started in 2006, but didn't go anywhere until it successfully raised $70,000 in six weeks on this site.
- Tower Unite: A Party Game made as a successor to GMod Tower, which had successfully raised $73,648 to secure a Steam Early Access release after failing to raise $100,000 on Kickstarter earlier.
- Canonical Ltd. with its high concept Ubuntu Edge smartphone set the then-largest goal for any crowdfunding campaign at $32 million in 2013. The Ubuntu Edge was intended to combine desktop computing in a high end smartphone, dual booting Android in smartphone mode and Ubuntu Linux in desktop modenote . Unfortunately, Canonical did not reach their ambitious target, raising only $12.8 million in the campaign's 30 day period. The Ubuntu Edge ranks among one the top 10 most funded crowdfunded Indiegogo campaigns of all time, and to date, it is the highest funded campaign which failed to reach its target.
- Blade Devil: Another case of a massively successful ($300,000+) indie comic campaign that suffered from some controversy surrounding its creator. (See Jawbreakers: Lost Souls above for a similar example.)
