Kickstarter has been criticized on and off in recent months for allowing celebrities to use the crowdfunding service to raise money — most recently Zach Braff, who raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter for a follow-up to his movie Garden State. Now, Kickstarter has decided to break its silence and address the issue.

In a blog post published late Thursday, Kickstarter's founders noted that their goal is to let anyone find funding for their creative projects, regardless of whether they're "big or small, established or Indie, serious or fun."

"That’s our mission," the founders wrote. "We’re a tool available to anyone (in the U.S. and UK, currently) to fund and build a community around their creative project."

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The Kickstarter team then tried to shoot down one of the biggest complaints about celebrities using Kickstarter: that it takes away attention and funding from other worthy projects from lesser known people on the website.

"The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter," the founders wrote. "63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects."

Kickstarter made a similar argument last year in a post about the video games and comics categories, which noted a significant positive ripple effect from blockbuster Kickstarter campaigns.

Even if it's the case that famous people like Braff end up attracting new donors to the website, there's still a more fundamental question about whether the presence of these celebrities end up encouraging or discouraging more people to take a chance on launching a campaign of their own.

As we pointed out in an earlier article on the subject, it was Kickstarter's co-founder Yancey Strickler who best summed up this concern in an interview with Fast Company earlier this year.

"The thing is, if Michael Bay came along and wanted to do a Kickstarter we'd probably tell him, please don't," Strickler said at the time."I would never want to scare the girl who wants to do a $500 lithography project, 'cause that's why we started this thing. We think we have a moral obligation to her."

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Image courtesy of Kickstarter, Zach Braff