Kickstarter just announced that they are becoming a Public Benefit Corporation. What this entails is that they are still a for-profit company but they are under stricter rules in order to provide good basically it ‘falls somewhere on the spectrum between a corporation and a true non-profit.’ “A benefit corporation has a legal responsibility to perform a social good, to provide a benefit to society,” says Kickstarter’s co-founder and CEO Yancey Strickler. The impacts on Kickstarter Campaigns are negligible, basically anything you could have done before on the site you can do now, but it makes one feel better knowing where the profit is going and that the company has a much more public entity.
This article also touches on the fact that they don’t plan to make some form of equity option to the system as it changes the model they work with:
“I think that an equity-driven model of cultural production results in the same world we’ve been stuck in,” Strickler said, “where if a new idea is asked to justify itself by its potential profitability, I think that restricts the amount of innovation and new ideas that come into the world. To me, that is a world of sequels, of less original content, of people not taking chances because when you’re asking an audience to look at it through the filter of ‘is this a good investment or not’ and I think that’s often a poor fit with the world of art and culture.”