Kickstarter is slowly and surely becoming a major force in the film business, something I noted in my post earlier this year. The Inocente win comes close on the heels of Kickstarter-backed films taking center stage at the Sundance Film Festival. According to Kickstarter, the total amount of dollars pledged to Film and Video projects is, as of today, $104.9 million. And in 2012, Kickstarter saw $57.96 million dollars pledged and 3,891 successfully funded projects in 2012.

When I interviewed Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen last year, I asked him if Kickstarter could perhaps upend the institutional control of the creative industries. Here is what he said:

we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history….any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way.

Looks like fox is in the henhouse.

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On its website, it notes:

In the past 3 years, Kickstarter inspired filmmakers to launch 20,000+ projects, accounting for over $100 million of the $450 million pledged to date. 19 KS-funded films — 10% of the slate — were official Sundance 2012 selections, with 4 award winners!

Since its early days, the total amount of dollars pledged to Film and Video projects is, as of today, $104.9 million. And the total number of successfully funded projects is 8,680. In 2012, Kickstarter saw $57.96 million dollars pledged and 3,891 successfully funded projects.

Most of the attention accorded to Kickstarter is because of gizmos and gadgets like the Ouya gaming platform or the Pebble Watch. But since its very beginning it has provided crowd funding for creative projects – music albums, documentaries and feature films. When I interviewed Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen last year, I asked him if Kickstarter could perhaps upend the institutional control of the creative industries. Here is what he said:

we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history.

…any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way. People are watching films that were made on Kickstarter and playing games that were made on Kickstarter. I think the big media companies are going to continue to have things that they’re going to keep making for the mass audiences, but we hope we’re eating away at the bad stuff.

Three Kickstarter funded films — Kings Point, Buzkashi Boys and Inocente — became the fourth, fifth and sixth films to be nominated for Oscars. Add the good stuff at Sundance, and Kickstarter’s young CEO might be getting his dream of eating at the bad stuff come true.

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Kickstarter backers pledged more than $300 million for a variety of projects, from an app that tells you when it will rain to a bus stop construction in Athens, Georgia. But as my colleague Ki Mae Huessner pointed out in GigaOM’s post on our favorite Kickstarter projects of the year, there are certainly some questions about the platform’s success.

Plenty of projects don’t hit their deadlines and entrepreneurs have sometimes struggled to meet the demand for scale from backers. However, as Om Malik wrote in his interview with founder Perry Chen, Kickstarter is a visual representation of the crowd funding movement that’s providing new ways for entrepreneurs and makers to access capital. At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, Chen said he has no interest in selling Kickstarter or taking it to an IPO.

Here are some of the most interest pieces of information from the Kickstarter year in review, which can be viewed in full here:

• More than 2 million people pledged $319,786,629 and successfully funded 18,109 projects
• More than $274 million was actually collected via funded projects
• Of the more than 2 million people who backed a project, 452 people backed more than 100 projects
• Music had the most projects funded (5,067) but games had the most money pledged ($83 million)
• Only 17 projects raised more than $1 million
• 10 percent of films at Sundance were funded through Kickstarter, and a Kickstarter-funded film was nominated for an Oscar, and a Kickstarter-funded opera came to the Kennedy Center
• Kickstarter funds the world’s first pizza museum

And here are the categories Kickstarter used to break down the funding:

And here’s Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen speaking at our RoadMap 2012 conference in November:

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Buoyed by Double Fine Adventure, which earlier this year received $1 million in just one day, the games category went from the eighth most funded to the second most funded ($75 million) in less than a year.

But more launches doesn’t mean more successes—that rate has held at about 44 % for the site overall, according to Kickstarter spokesman Justin Kazmark. Film and video, the most common Kickstarter category, is the seventh most likely category to be successfully funded. (Note: Kickstarter only consider projects that are completely funded to be successes.)

And some categories fare better than others.

While dance has the fewest launches, it has the highest success rate at 70 percent.

Kickstarters range in price from under a thousand dollars to over a million dollars, with the median funding in the $1,000 to $9,999 range.

Kickstarter’s co-founder Perry Chen spoke at our Roadmap conference earlier this week — he answered questions about a possible IPO and other topics.

Here’s video of Kickstarter co-founder and CEO Perry Chen speaking at Roadmap 2012 last week.

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Chen also reminisced a little bit about the past of Kickstarter, explaining that he first came up with the idea for it in 2001 when trying to out on a concert in New Orleans. Those plans fell apart when Chen was confronted with too high upfront costs, and he wondered: “What if the audience could have gone online and just bought a ticket?”

That idea of involving the audience early on eventually became Kickstarter, and Chen drew some parallels to other forces of the social web and their way of empowering content creators. “Previously, people could talk to their community via Twitter and blogs,” he said, adding: “Now, you can even get funding from your community.”

Chen said that the nature of the site hasn’t really changed since its launch in 2009, with film still being the biggest category of projects. However, he said that games have quickly become a much bigger deal than they previously were. Last year, $3.5 million were pledged for games, he explained. This year, games have already attracted 20 times as much finding on the site.

Kickstarter recently put out new guidelines to product makers that require them to not post mock photos of their products, and Chen said Monday that it was important for people on Kickstarter to be honest with their community, which includes communicating challenges. “Creators need to… set expectations for their backers,” he said. But backers also need to have realistic expectations, he added. “It’s not a store. It’s not Best Buy.”

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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We’ve brought together some of the best design-oriented minds we could find to share their insights at RoadMap 2012, starting a little later on Monday in San Francisco. It’s an impressive roster of speakers, including former Apple executive Tony Fadell, now reinventing the way we think about home automation with Nest; Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter and a new way to find grass-roots support for new projects; John Maeda, who is currently teaching the next generation of talented minds how to think about design as president of the Rhode Island School of Design; and Evan Willams, one of the founders behind a simple idea — Twitter — that has changed the world with its intuitive design and the current CEO of Obvious Corp.

We’ll be updating this page with live coverage from the event written by GigaOM’s talented team of writers, and a live stream of the event can also be found here. It all gets started at 8:30am Monday with opening remarks from GigaOM founder Om Malik and Senior Writer Katie Fehrenbacher, who organized the event. Please join the conversation on Twitter by following @gigaom and using the #roadmapconf hashtag.

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Now Kickstarter is now officially taking the first steps toward a larger international rollout. The plan is to take the service to other countries soon, after seeing how the UK launch goes, Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler told the BBC.

U.K. Kickstarter projects operate very similarly to U.S. projects, except that they list money in pounds for U.K. visitors. Kickstarter is still charging a 5 percent fee on successfully funded projects in the U.K. but is using a different payment processor there, instead of Amazon.

Kickstarter first announced the U.K. launch three weeks ago and said at the time it was updating its shipping system to make it easier for project creators to ask for additional money from international backers to pay for international shipping costs.

We’ll be chatting with next week with Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference, which is dedicated to the intersection of design and connectedness.

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