YouTube Let's Creators Fundraise Through Annotation Links to Kickstarter & IndieGoGo

Andy Stack, a YouTube product manager, today announced on The Official YouTube Partners & Creators Blog that YouTube has teamed up with Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to enable users to link directly to project pages on these platforms through annotations.

Kickstarter is a crowd funding website for creative projects.  It was founded in 2008 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler.  Kickstarter has funded a diverse array of endeavors, ranging from indie films, music and comics to journalism, video games and food-related projects.

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IndieGoGo is an international crowd funding site.  It was founded by Slava Rubin, Danae Ringellmann and Eric Schell in 2008. IndieGoGo’s headquarters are in San Francisco, CA.  As of 2011, it has hosted over 45,000 funding campaigns in areas such as music, charity, small business and film.

In his post, Stack said,

“Over the past year, crowdsourced fundraising has exploded as great way to raise money for creative projects. We’ve seen lots of you using platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to fund projects, and we want to make it easier for even more of you to use these tools. We’ve teamed up with these platforms so you can now link directly to project pages on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo through annotations.”

To use the feature, go to your Video Manager, click “Edit” and select Annotations. You can find more information on annotations in the YouTube help center and here.

Among the creators who have funded projects through these platforms are Freddie Wong, who used Kickstarter for Video Game High School and James Rolfe, who used IndieGoGo for Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie.  Other creators are already using the new annotations feature to help fund their latest projects, and you can see examples at both Kickstarter and IndieGoGo.

Here's an example of a producer trying to fund a new Documentary through a kickstarter campaign and you can view the campaign here.  As of the time of writing this, $5900 has already been donated from 155 different backers.

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