Kickstarter’s reluctance to involve itself in its failed crowdfunding campaigns is well noted, with projects that have collapsed financially before giving their backers their promised rewards slipping beneath the radar, leaving financial contributors to these projects out of pocket in the process. This is a fundamental risk one takes when choosing to support a campaign on Kickstarter, with the site maintaining its position as a middle man between projects and their backers, distancing themselves from any legal responsibility.
However, as we previously reported, Kickstarter’s lackadaisical approach to even investigating its failed projects is disappointing, and the company’s latest actions regarding the $3.4 million collapse of the Zano drone is indicative of how little insurance backers have when they pass over their money to creators.
The Zano drone had a record-breaking campaign, becoming the highest funded Kickstarter project in Europe, but last month its creators the Torquing Group announced that they had gone bankrupt, having only shipped 600 of over 12,000 drones that were promised to its backers. Kickstarter released a statement after the Torquing Group’s announcement, saying that there had been email exchanges between the two parties. However, considering the vast amount of backers’ money that had disappeared, many were unhappy with the site’s response, especially considering that Kickstarter had effectively earned $170,000 from the failed project due to the 5% cut the site takes from all its campaigns.
But now it has been revealed that Kickstarter is launching an “investigation” of sorts, only one that is limited to the hiring of freelance journalist Mark Harris, who has been commissioned by the site to research and detail the progress of the project “from start to finish.” In a post titled ‘An unusual commission,’ Harris writes: “Kickstarter has asked me to lay out the progress of the project, from start to finish; to discover what happened to the over £2m in funds pledged; and to answer the questions of whether Zano’s creators could have done anything differently, or made mistakes that future Kickstarter projects might avoid.” That Kickstarter’s response to the Zano drone’s collapse is to commission an outsider to investigate it is laughable, and begs the question: what prevents start-ups from using the site as a means of obtaining vasts amount of money without having to offer anything in return, other than their personal moral obligations?
This is not an indictment of Harris’ talents as a journalist, but rather of Kickstarter’s complete lack of accountability when it comes to projects featured on the site. It’s understandable that the site would want to distance itself from all legalities pertaining to each individual project posted to the site, but that the company’s response to a failure as monumental as the Zano drone is to hire a lone freelance journalist will surely not sit well with the project’s backers.
It should be reiterated that Kickstarter has earned a considerable amount of money off the back of the Zano campaign, and as such there are expectations of the company to ensure that unfortunate circumstances such as this do not occur with increased regularity. But with Kickstarter leaving the vast majority of the leg-work up to the backers if a project fails, with the only way of Zano’s backers retrieving their money being if they file a lawsuit against the Torquing Group themselves, it certainly highlights a problem that the site is doomed to continue to face, and one that will ultimately ensure that people will grow increasingly suspicious of future projects and of Kickstarter in general.
