Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is the when a group of people pool money together (usually in small increments) towards a common goal or cause.

So where did this idea come from? Well, no one exactly knows, but certainly two ideas had a huge influence.

The first is the development of micro-financing, which became famous by a Bangladeshi banker and Nobel Peace Prize winner by the name of Muhammad Yunus. He created a way for impoverished people to get money, in very small increments, to start businesses.

The second idea is crowdsourcing. This is when big groups of people submit small amounts of content to create something that coudn't have been created by any other means. Think of YouTube or Wikipedia. No company could alone create the content that is on YouTube, or even pay for it. Why not? Because there is too much of it and paying for it would immediately change what the content is.

Crowdfunding meshes these two very powerful ideas together. Why haven't they been done before? Because only the internet allows the creation of such a platform.