Kickstarter on its way to Australia and New Zealand

Crowdfunding site offers two "schools" next month to teach Australian to use Kickstarter

If you live in Australia or New Zealand and you've got the next big idea, then you're in luck as Kickstarter is going to be coming your way very soon!

The crowd funding website says it will be expanding to the new territories "in the very near future," according to the Kickstarter Australia page.

You would think that Australia, like everyone else, would have heard of Kickstarter by now, especially given the recent controversy over the funding of projects with big Hollywood names attached to them, like Zack Braff and Spike Lee. But, in case they haven't, Kickstarter will be holding two "schools" to help them learn how the site works.

The first school will be held in Sydney on September 1st, and the other will be held in Melbourne on September 2nd. Admission to both events is free. 

"We'll be in Australia the next few weeks hosting Kickstarter Schools with Australia-based creators interested in Kickstarter. If you have a project in mind and want to run it by us, or if you just want to learn more about Kickstarter, we hope you’ll join us!" the company said.

Kickstarter is currently only available in the United States, the United Kingdom and in Canada. There is no specific date given for them the Australian launch will take place.

Founded in 2009, Kickstarter has become the go-to place for crowd funding projects.

The site says that it has seen $761 million pledged in all, and 47,530 successfully funded projects out of 111,665 launched on the site, for a 44% success rate. Only $85 million have gone toward projects that have failed.

Kickstarter has been seeing its fair share of controversy lately, over projects started on the site by people who, by most standards, should not need to crowdfund their projects.

The latest example of this was Spike Lee, who recently raised $1,418,910 of a $1,250,000 goal from 6,421 backers to make his latest film.

Lee took so much criticism for the move that he was forced to defend himself right on his own project page.

"The fact of the matter is I’m bringing exposure to KICKSTARTER, backers to KICKSTARTER who have never even heard of KICKSTARTER before. The same was true of the VERONICA MARS and ZACH BRAFF’S projects. There was also a study done that had data to prove we did not hurt the young filmmakers on KICKSTARTER either," he wrote.

Kickstarter itself has also been force to defend these projects, saying that projects with big names attract funding to other projects on the site that normally wouldn't get the same exposure. 

Personally, I don't have a problem with these types of campaigns; I have read over and over how hard it is for movies to get funded in a Hollywood that wouldn't know, or simply doesn't care about, what a real movie actually is.

But with Kickstarter heading to Australia and New Zealand, there is one nightmare scenario that should keep us all up at night: if Peter Jackson tries to raise money to make even more Lord of the Rings movies, that will be the quickest way to turn me against these types of projects.

This news was first noticed by TheNextWeb.

(Image source: https://www.kickstarter.com/australia)