9. Penny Arcade Ad-Free (Goal: $250,000... Or $1,000,000/Pledged: $528,144)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcade-sells-out?ref=nav_search People don't like ads. How much do you not like ads? Are you willing to help raise a quarter of a million dollars so that your favorite website can stop featuring ads... on some of its secondary pages, but not the page you're most likely to read? Or how about one buck shy of a million to make the site completely ad-free? For a year? Seems like a ludicrous, ridiculous waste of money, right? Well, not if you're Tycho and Gabe of Penny Arcade, circa 2012. Credit where it's due: this is the best-produced Kickstarter video you'll find here, displaying the sense of humor that made Penny Arcade a webcomics hit. And the Kickstarter was a qualified success, topping out at $528,144, enough to take HALF the ads off the site for a year. But, as Tycho himself
admitted after the year was up, most people don't care about ads, and because the ads in Penny Arcade were carefully curated, many Penny Arcade fans actually missed them! You could argue that raising so much money was clear evidence that other fans wanted what Penny Arcade was offering, even if they did have to add more content-related stretch goals to get that far. But that's not the point. The point is that those loyal fans shelling out money in support of Penny Arcade would have been much happier if their money were being used to make new things, not just put the old ones into slightly less cluttered layouts. The company's second venture into crowdfunding seemed to learn from this. It had a $10 goal and far more enticing stretch goals right at the start: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcades-podcast-downloadable-content-the-ret/description