Kickstarter is introducing a new feature to help its successful creators showcase what happens after they raise money on the crowdfunding website.
Spotlight takes the form of a webpage for each successfully funded project, replacing the pitch page that until now has remained online permanently once a project’s campaign ends.
Each Spotlight page will also include a timeline of the project’s history, which Kickstarter hopes will show the stories behind the crowdfunding campaigns, including how people got their products to market once the money was raised.
More than 80,000 projects have been successfully funded on Kickstarter since its launch in 2008. Their creators will have full control of their Spotlight pages, which the company is describing as a “permanent showcase” of their work.
“We know a creator’s Kickstarter page is often core to the identity of the project they brought to life from our platform,” a Kickstarter spokesperson said.
“It’s often a top search result for artists and entrepreneurs, so it’s an important part of how their audience interacts with them and the story they share about themselves and their work after funding.”
Creators will also be able to direct visitors to their Spotlight page to external websites – for example, a link to buy a product that is now commercially available.
Kickstarter has become an increasingly prominent service in the technology world, with some companies using it to turn their prototypes into commercial products, while others with a product ready for launch use it more for promotion and pre-orders.
The technology category has generated some of the most-funded projects on Kickstarter in recent years, including the Coolest beer cooler (which raised $13.3m), the Pebble smartwatch ($10.3m), the Ouya games console ($8.6m) and musician Neil Young’s Pono digital music player ($6.2m).
Pebble’s follow-up campaign for the Pebble Time smartwatch, which is still in progress, is set to pass $20m two and a half days before its funding deadline.
