5,689 Indians have contributed a total $1.1 million ($1,117,294) to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, which has till now received $1 billion in pledges from 5.7 million people. United States was the biggest contributor to projects on the website with $663 million, followed by UK with $54 million. Canada was the third biggest contributor with $44 million from 216,162 people.

Though the amount raised from India might be low in comparison, Indians contributed an average of $196 per head, as opposed to $176 by Americans and $170 by people in UK. Among BRIC countries, Brazil was the biggest contributor with $3.77 million pledged by 21,052 people; Russia followed with $3.35 million from 15,183 backers and 4,413 Chinese raised $1.25 million.

The statistics from India is interesting because Kickstarter currently supports projects based out of US only, due to which, a lot of Indian companies that want to crowdsource funding prefer to use Indiegogo. For example Fin smart ring, Gecko bluetooth tags and Androidly all used Indiegogo to raise funding. That said, there are several art related projects around India that have used Kickstarter to raise funding, such as this documentary on socio-ecological changes occurring throughout the Binsar Valley of the Himalayas, a film on music in India and a short film on finding a surrogate mother among others. It is worth noting that all these projects were started by Americans and not by people in India.

In India, the model hasn’t really been tested much; there is Wishberry, RangDe which said last year that the model is part of its roadmap and LetsVenture which was used by Bluegrape to raise funding.

As a side note, here is some other information revealed by the website about the people who back projects: