
The wild success of the drive will end up giving all OOTS’ fans “more OOTS, better OOTS, and…faster OOTS” for years to come.
#Kickstarter order of the stick cracked#
Within nine days, the drive had paid for reprinting every book that needed to be reprinted going in, cracked the top ten drives in Kickstarter history the next day, and reprinted every single book in the series the day after that, with two-thirds of the drive still to go.By the time the drive was three days old, it had already succeeded beyond Rich’s wildest expectations (he only ever expected two books to be reprinted from the drive).Within 48 hours, the drive was the highest-earning in the history of the Comics category, a record it has now broken ten times over.The initial goal was broken in barely over twenty-four hours.To gain some perspective on just how much OOTS’ fans have done over the past month: With the improvements to the site and comic likely to come, the demonstrated devotion of the fans, and the increased popularity of the comic both as a result of the Kickstarter itself and with the books restocked on store shelves, I’d argue it’s as big a milestone in the history of the comic as anything that’s occured in the comic itself. Just as it brought a change to the world of funding and launching products, another could bring yet more changes to the still-nascent field of crowd-funding.When the book is written and the legacy and history of OOTS is summarized, it will be noted that in early 2012, the comic’s fans took a donation drive with a goal of barely over fifty thousand dollars and raised one and a quarter million dollars by the time it was over.

What remains to be seen is how long Kickstarter itself can remain on top. But the scale of the site is growing and naysayers are constant casualties. Before last month, many would have thought that raising millions via Kickstarter was a fantasy. It just goes to show that crowd-funding is a space with a ton of room to grow as new models and ideas are found to be applicable. Many of the backers were on Kickstarter for the first time to back the big projects, and these big names on the marquee ended up working as advertisements for the site itself as well. They’re not just staying in the original category, either: 22% of each group of original backers have been busy in other categories, backing nearly 2000 projects with over $1m all told. And in webcomics, where the Order of the Stick book was categorized, the number of pledges per week, on average, has doubled. In the gaming category, for instance, only one project had reached $100,000 in funding before last month.


There are a ton of details at Kickstarter’s blog post, but the gist is this: the two biggest projects lately, Double Fine Adventure and Order of the Stick, brought in millions of dollars themselves, but have also produced a halo of funding where there was very little before.
