Kickstarter Responds To Controversy Over Zach Braff Campaign

Zack Braff raised more than $2 million for his follow-up to the movie Garden State thanks to online platform Kickstarter and his involvement with the crowdfunding sourced immediately drew criticism.

After allowing critics to fully voice their opinions about the platform the company on Thursday blogged about it’s mission and focus. In the blog post Kickstarter writes that the platform was built to help projects “big or small, established or Indie, serious or fun.”

The company’s founders then write:

“That’s our mission. We’re a tool available to anyone (in the U.S. and UK, currently) to fund and build a community around their creative project.”

When talking about celebrity campaigns taking away from other worthwhile posts the platforms founders write:

“The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.”

Kickstarter gave a similar response in 2012 when critics became concerned that too many veteran game developers were using the platform to raise money for entertainment projects.

Kickstarter became a widely used crowdfunding project after it helped several unknown company’s become successful.

Zach Braff reached his $2 million funding goal for Garden State 2 and his involvement on Kickstarter hasn’t seemed to effect any other funding programs.

With new projects popping up each day the truth is that Kickstarter projects will attract people who are truly interested in those projects. For example, Zach Braff is not likely to attract the same clientele as someone offering a state of the art Google Android peripheral or a new streaming set-top box.

Do you think Zach Braff’s involvement on Kickstarter undermines the crowdfunding platform?