One Less Hoop: YouTube ‘Gets’ Crowdfunding

Opinions expressed in Game of Buzz are those of the author alone.

YouTube users are now able to pop a link to crowd funding sites Kickstarter and IndieGoGo right inside their videos. Google announced the new use of the Annotations feature on the official YouTube Creator blog this morning.

On the surface this may not seem like that big of a deal, allowing a small link in the video window to a fundraising page, from a user engagement angle this is huge. Every barrier that is removed between a project and a potential funder is a win for the crowd funding movement.

This also bolsters YouTube’s position as the dominant marketplace for original online video content. The video giant has been pushing it’s new channel format in recent months, and is following the lead of creators like Freddie Wong in embracing crowd funding as a means of financing content.

While technology and video game projects on Kickstarter have seen a dramatic uptick in funding this year, the full potential of crowd funding has yet to be unlocked. The YouTube audience is far larger than the funding pool of even the most succesful Kickstarter project, and the potential is there to condition that audience into being regular contributors to the programming they watch.

Crowd funding emerged as the financial balast to the Creative Commons model of sharing content freely, and there is no bigger repository of sharable media than YouTube.

[h/t to Lucas McNelly, via TechCrunch]