suibhne
Watchdog
Not at all. There are two very good reasons to make this announcement: Kickstarter is looking for additional investment, and Kickstarter intends to go public within the next few years. I'd be surprised if both of these things aren't true.
Overall, your post suggests you're not all that familiar with the crowdfunding scene or any of the economics here. Kickstarter's backer-facing infrastructure (and third-party ecosystem) and user-facing portals are more mature than most other platforms out there, and Kickstarter's fees to backers are roughly equal to those of other platforms (higher than IndieGoGo's basic campaign structure, but the same as others like Fundly and Crowdrise). And not only is Kickstarter's fee structure competitive with other crowdfunding platforms (despite offering much greater reach) - it's also vastly lower than the margin taken by other internet-enabled service connectors.
But hey, for the sake of argument, let's dig into the economics of the rest of your argument.
Even if you assume that the 5% is pure margin - which is ridiculous - that amounts to less than 40 bps (0.40%) taken from projector creators. Since the 5% we're discussing is a fraction of Kickstarter's bottom-line profit rather than its percentage take from each project, let's assume an 80% net margin - which is insanely high even for a platform like this, but fine. That gives us a decrease of about 30 bps from the actual project.
In other words, even with aggressive assumptions about Kickstarter's margin from each project, donating 5% in company profits means a 0.32% reduction in the funding received by each project creator.
Except that you just questioned that. You're apparently not doing the math, but you seem to believe you have a better solution for Kickstarter's business model that involves taking lower margin from project creators.
The primary motivations for Fig seem to be "active curation by a central committee of learned citizens" and "equity investment via crowdfunding". The US now allows the latter, but Kickstarter has announced that it won't be supporting this (for arguably good reasons, since equity investment in an information-poor environment is a terrible, terrible idea). Fwiw, of course, Fig won't allow it either…except for wealthy individuals with net worth > $1M.
) You're suggesting that Kickstarter should reduce its margin so that it's actually cheaper than most competing crowdsourcing platforms, even tho it currently delivers far more reach than those platforms. It's fine to suggest that, but I think the context is helpful.