If Martin Luther King was alive today, he might find it much easier to realize his dream without delivering that famous speech—— all he’d need to do is post a project proposal on Kickstarter and call for donations. These days, crowdfunding is the ubiquitous and all-powerful funding method used by everybody from startups to music fans, political campaigners to software developers. It can even—if the show 2 Broke Girls is to be believed—raise money for a pair of expensive pants at the bargain price of 3 slaps. That’s a pretty good deal, isn’t it?
There are always good deals to be found on crowdfunding websites. The biggest crowdfunded project in China drew 5,534 donors and raised more than $200,000 in support of an online cartoon series called “One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes” on DemoHour, China’s first crowdfunding site. This is a paltry sum compared to projects in the US, for example the Pebble Watch, which reached up to $10 million.
By 2025, crowdfunding in China could explode to a $46 -$50 billion industry—about half the amount expected to be channeled to startups and businesses throughout the world. While crowdfunding is already a billion dollar business in over 45 countries, it’s still a tiny niche in China, raising only a few million dollars a year. Despite all the startups booming in this market, there’s only one crowdfunding site operating in China, plus another one in Hong Kong. Compare this to 17 in Brazil, 87 in the UK and 344 in the US. Entrepreneurial activities are limited by cultural norms and unsound intellectual property laws here in China, and the same issues could be holding back large-scale adoption of the crowdfunding model.
DemoHour, the one and only Chinese crowdfunding site, limits projects to design, film, music, publishing, games, photography and technology, with film and video as its top categories. Due to lack of support, Chinese entrepreneurs, especially in the tech sector, sometimes have to go abroad for crowdfunding.
