Graph from Fred Benenson

Kickstarter's Fred Benenson and Yancey Strickler are back with another data-rich post about growth at the hot New York startup, which helps creative projects crowdsource their funding needs. The two-year-old company just received a pledge from its one-millionth backer, and is seeing new users pledge for the first time at a rapidly accelerating rate.

As Kickstarter writes:

Let’s start by defining what we mean by backer. Someone becomes a backer when they pull out a credit card and pledge money to a project. Being a backer is a higher bar than a user (someone who signs up for a site), and different than a pledge (the transaction itself). One million backers means one million different people from around the world have pledged money to a project on Kickstarter.

The above graph shows the cumulative path to 1,000,000 backers. The first 200,000 backers took 16 months; the last 200,000 took just three months. Currently about 75,000 new backers pledge to projects each month.

Kickstarter projects succeed about 44 percent of the time, but backers have a much better average. 89 percent of backers have given to a successful project, while only 11 percent have not. Mr. Benenson singles out Neil Graham who has backed 94 projects to date and 83 out f 84 have finished successfully, ten pledges are for ongoing projects. That's a 98% success rate, the highest anyone on Kickstarter.

The positive experience seems to keep users engaged. Sixteen percent of users come back to support another project, and these power users contribute 32 percent of the total funds pledged. 90 percent of the $100,729,560 pledged so far has been in increments of $100 or less. Mr. Benenson concludes:

To put this in some context, the 2011 fiscal year budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is $154 million. At the current pace of more than $2 million in pledges each week, Kickstarter backers are pledging more than $100 million a year.

Interestingly the milestones of 1,000,000 backers and $100,000,000 pledged came within 48 hours of one another. This suggests the value of each backer being $100, and that’s about right. The average pledge amount is $71 and the average backer pledges to 1.4 projects.

Be sure to check out all the stats and amazing graphs over on Kickstarter's blog. And don't forget the old saying, more money, more problems. Kickstarter is currently suing a particularly persistent patent troll, who claims to have invented crowdfunding for creative projects.

What does it take to get big VC funding? Don't forget to check out our first original web series: The Pitch

Be your own bitch!

"Don't ever abdicate your personal presence on the web to some fucking company, put it on the open web," Fred Wilson declared today at Smash Summit. Mr. Wilson was debating which platforms on the web are important to brands and marketers, but went on an amazing tangent about the danger of trusting a firm like Google, Facebook or Twitter with your online identity.

"These companies are making choices about what's best for themselves. Like I've said, don't be Twitter's bitch, don't be Google's bitch, don't be Facebook's bitch, be your own bitch."

In terms of which platforms are important for brands, Mr. Wilson had a very clear hierarchy. "Quora's irrelevant," he told Mr. Scoble. "Nielsen had a study to look at amount of attention people pay to different sites on the web. Based on that, the brands and marketers should care about Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Tumblr."

Outside the U.S., Mr. Wilson pointed out, things are very different. "A Twitter clone in China is roughly the size of Twitter itself, which give you a sense of the scale in that market."

YouTube is a big platform, but does a poor job, said Mr. Wilson. "I really feel like they haven't done much to help people with large audiences and brands to develop followings there."

Apple still hasn't figured out this social layer. "This is an enormous problem. iOS developers are getting a thousand downloads a day, but can't ramp that up. They go to Tapjoy or Flurry to buy low quality downloads, there is no good way to do social discovery on iOS. It's identical to the way they run the music business, which is a hits-based business. If you get on the leaderboard you get a shitload of hits,but otherwise its very tough."

The same holds true for Google's mobile OS, with an important difference. "There is no social layer in Android, but I can share natively from inside my app to dozens of other apps like Facebook, Twitter or Kik. I think every market should be at least a duopoly, or we're screwed."

If you tune in to the livesteam right this second, you can hear Mr. Wilson discuss pseudonymity. "I think 'real names' is bullshit."