Chen puts it this way: Getting heard about entails a second creative project to drive the central one. You don’t have to make a video, but most money seekers do, and the successful ones avoid making it too slickly ad-like or blatantly amateurish; lighthearted hints that the creator is a little uncomfortable asking for money are a recurring trope. Taking the time to come up with creative, memorable rewards is more likely to get results.

I can confirm that I had no idea how much work a Kickstarter campaign would be. We had to dream up rewards that someone might actually want but that wouldn’t consume our budget, and I lost a weekend learning how to use video-editing software. But there was also this: for a month, I was shaking down every friend, and online “friend,” I could think of, hoping our pitch would go viral, fighting back irrational anger at longtime pals who ignored me and feeling insane gratitude toward total strangers who chipped in $10 or $25. (Disclosure: Chen, maybe because of the New Orleans connection, popped up among our backers, to the tune of $2. I didn’t know him and I had no plans at the time to write about the company.)

My experience, I admit, had some effect on the questions I later asked project makers. “It was wildly stressful,” Steven Zucker, who teaches art history at Pratt Institute, replied to one such query. He and his collaborators Beth Harris and Juliana Kreinik set out to raise $10,000 to add a new batch of material to Smarthistory.org, their free online alternative to a traditional art-history textbook. It felt, they told me, like a “referendum” on an effort that consumed them for years. (They ended up with $11,513.)

One afternoon I spoke with Gerd Ludwig, a photographer whose work includes impressive documentation of the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion for National Geographic, but whose usual publishing clients expressed no interest in sending him back to the scene of the disaster on its 25th anniversary. His studio manager suggested Kickstarter. At first, Ludwig, 64, shied away. “I thought, This is for younger guys,” he says. But he reconsidered. He raised $23,316 (almost double his goal) and gave himself the assignment that no editor would. His satisfaction goes beyond seeing this new work make its way into exhibitions. “When people vote with their pocketbooks, I find they’re supporting issue-driven projects and subjects,” he said. “It’s actually really reassuring. To put it in a simple phrase: I don’t think anybody would put out a hundred dollars for a paparazzo to follow Britney Spears.”

Ludwig is probably right about that, although it’s interesting to consider why. After all, millions of people do, in effect, pay the paparazzi to follow Britney Spears, by purchasing magazines and driving up the hit counts of ad-supported Web sites that traffic in precisely such material. But no gossip addict feels ownership of or responsibility for tabloid culture.

Many people are serial Kickstarter donors — more than 300 have backed 35 or more projects. Cindy Womack, for instance, has given to 128 projects ($45 was her biggest gift) usually involving theater or comics. She works for a theater company in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif. “I’ve known too many really talented artists who can’t stand in front of three people and explain, ‘Here’s why I need money,’ ” she says.

Lewis Winter, a designer in Melbourne, Australia, has given financial support to 373 projects (including three portrait commissions, an interest of his). “My motivations probably aren’t that different to the Medicis’ . . . just my budget,” Winter told me via e-mail. His average pledge is about $15, and his most generous was $140. “I think Kickstarter helps people do something a lot of us have forgotten how to do — ask our neighbors for help,” he continued. That said, he also had some caveats about the crowd as patron in the digital age, noting that projects typically get many more Facebook “likes” than actual backers: “Apparently a whole lot of people like something so much they’re not even willing to give it a dollar.”