Kickstarter has launched Drip – a new subscriptions tool which will enable artists and creators to receive recurring financial support from fans, friends, and new audiences.
The key difference between Kickstarter and Drip is that whereas Kickstarter enables one-time project funding, Drip has been designed for creators seeking to fund and build community around their ongoing creative practice.
According to Perry Chen, Founder of Kickstarter: ‘Funding remains one of the biggest challenges for artists and creators. Drip builds on what we’ve learned over 8+ years with Kickstarter, but instead puts creators – not projects – at the centre of the conversation. The goal is the same – helping people bring their creative work to life.’
Drip is open to creators in Art, Comics, Crafts, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Illustration, Journalism, Music, Photography, Podcasts & Radio, Publishing, Technology, and Theatre giving them a platform to sustainably fund their practice and maintain creative independence.
Creators will be able to use Drip as a platform to share and receive payment for their work. A creator’s Drip might offer subscribers early access to work, exclusive material, or behind-the-scenes updates on works-in-progress. Creators will be able to set up different subscription tiers and subscribers can support them every month or with each release of new material.
Now an invite-only platform, Drip’s design is intentionally pared-back to allow creators to take centre-stage and is scheduled to open up to more creators in early 2018.
Every Drip will begin with a Founding Membership period of seven to 30 days and offer limited ‘Founding Member’ subscription tiers to help creators build momentum replicating Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing mechanism, where a project is only successful if it reaches its funding target within a set period of time.
Drip launched with creators from around the world, amongst them UK creators including comedian Richard Herring, Nottingham’s community run darkroom, The Photo Parlour and the multimedia foodie platform Great British Chefs, who currently have a project live on Kickstarter.
Like Kickstarter, Drip will not place profits and growth above the company’s mission and Drip creators will not be tied to the platform and will be able to export their data, content and live subscribers to alternative platforms with ease. Creators on Drip will have seamless access to Kickstarter’s global community of 14 million users who will be able to use Drip with their Kickstarter account.
