Whoa.  We just became the top story on the front page of slashdot.org.  The comments are predictably trollish, but we also got two thousand hits on PinkFive.com in the past hour... and almost 1K in donations in the same time.

So that's nice.

Figured it was worth a try - all our promotion is peaking right now, Brian and others are at DragonCon helping spread the gospel...   gotta do something for the next four days. 

But whether we hit that goal or not...

'cause I figure i can take the 20K and use it to make some REAL money.     Can't possibly fail.

So anyway, that happened.    Thanks all for your efforts!      

Now we're debating our "stretch goal"...  something extra we'll do if we can hit a new funding level before time runs out...

Well, I can tell you we did get a pledge from storiesonline.net (Kickstarter tells you what sites your pledges come from, so you can see what's generating the most results).   

It wasn't the sole reason for the incredible $5K day we had.... but it helped!

It's that credit sequence that's amazing.   How much '80's did THAT show have in it?  All of it.  All of the '80's.

Chalk it up to the world as it was before home video.   There weren't THAT many cheap 50's horror movies available to be shown on Saturday afternoon creature features - any kid who watched as religiously as I did pretty much saw them ALL within a year or two.   

I think I saw Giant Claw more than once, actually.     And I musta seen THEM half a dozen times by the time I was fourteen.

Yes.  Although I avoided saying so in the description, we are including those rewards with the $50 level, since they don't cost us anything to fulfill.

Well, _I_ haven't, because I've never used Tumblr and don't know what promo images and tracked tags are...   

But is that something someone else could do? 

Unlike the system we have now. 

Unfortunately, we realized too late that that kind of "original content" would have been far more profitable...

All right DiF team - progress report time.  We're past the halfway point in our 30-day funding window... but not past the halfway point in actual funding.

However, there's a lot of good news here.  First of all, we're well out of the "death zone" - half of all Kickstarter projects die with nearly no pledges at all.  Statistically, just passing 30% of our goal means we're far more likely to go all the way.    Second, funding tends to pick up in the back half of Kickstarter campaigns anyway - people start to respond to the ticking clock.

But even so - we've stalled a bit in the past few days and we need to hit the gas again.   There's a direct correlation between Twitter/Facebook blasts and donations - we do the former, we see a rise in the latter.   But the thing about Twitter and Facebook posts is that if people don't see them right away, they vanish off the screen.    Or they see them and decide to check on them later, then forget.    So the name of the game is - keep doing it!   (All of MY Facebook and Twitter followers can vouch for how annoying I've been.)   

Also, Celebration VI is happening now, and we've got people there working the floor on our behalf.  And we're still working to get more writeups on blogs and news outlets, too - these things are especially good because they tend to last a bit longer than tweets, and can go into more detail.   

So anyway -  anyone who wants to help out, get out there and spread the word (again)!   Hell, even though we didn't get a lot of traction from Reddit, we still saw donations from it.   Totally worth it.   

Don't think you have to limit yourselves to Star Wars-centric zones, either.  We got huge numbers from a sound-mixing blog post, and Owen's wacko scoring of a retweet from Gun's N' Roses' guitarist is probably the biggest single pledge-generator we've had.   Who wants to try to top it?

Thanks everyone for all the help thus far... now, ready and.... go!

heh, I dunno if you've been on the Internet lately, but.... 

Only the most commercial things have ever been supported by advertising.    Or to a lesser extent, the subscription model as Allison pointed out.    The only new development is that eyeballs are now moving to the Internet... and advertisers are moving with them.    You can watch a cat video on YouTube and it'll come with a pre-roll and a banner overlay now. 

Some companies will make the transition, others will disappear and some new ones will take their place.   The game is the same, just the players are changing.   The belief that "teh internet will democratize all creativity!" lasted about six weeks, and ended years ago.  Now everyone's chasing the money, just like before.

Hulu, for example, offers both models - ad-based for some content, subscription-based for more content.  Newspapers and magazines are moving to online models, but only as fast as advertisers are willing to buy ad space to make it worth doing.   

The only holdup is that advertisers still aren't willing yet to put money into internet ads as much as the tried-and-true existing venues - because even now the internet as a whole still can't guarantee the number of eyeballs that  traditional media can.   But some companies (like Hulu) are getting close to that point, enough so that they've started to put money into original content.    As is the subscription-based Netflix.   But to get their money, you have to convince them that your product will retain their audience... which means it's already exactly like TV and movies have operated for decades.  Just with less money involved. 

As of today we're still not at the point where an online model of any kind can justify the expense of making The Avengers, or Lost, or anything of that level.   Kickstarter seems unlikely to ever fill that gap, either.    So the question is - will a Hulu or Netflix ever reach the point where they are greenlighting hundred-million dollar projects?    (Or maybe the question should be -  how soon will they?)