Thanks for the comment! I have to wonder where you think the money will come from? What will be the motive to donate? If this is a question about the crowfund

Thanks for the comment! I have to wonder where you think the money will come from? What will be the motive to donate? If this is a question about the crowfunding site itself, this is a non-issue. Any running costs will be covered. Donations are not required. If the service becomes meaningful to a lot of people, there will be motivated people to support it in different ways. Do you have experience with the not for profit model? Some, yes. I don't mean to brush aside your valid concerns for the long-term financial health of the project, but the initial costs will not be unsurmountable. I have serious financial problems and could use the money. I wish I could find a way to crowd fund what I do. If I do, most likely that won't be called "crowd funding". It will be called "sales to the public", perhaps in the form of t-shirts, merchandising, etc. So this is part of the reason why I want to do this. A lot of people creating content have to just throw the content out there and hope it sticks and is monetizable. The crowdfunding model however is a good "sales to the public" model, I think, especially when used as a pre-demand and pre-order model. The biggest projects on Kickstarter for example have been pre-demand projects, where someone has created a wriststrap for the iPod Nano or a tripod mount for a camera phone and sold pre-orders for these. We know that digital content is distributed freely, and this will not go away. For a writer, for example, this can be a serious problem. Say you create a non-fiction how-to book on something very specific and niche. A couple of people buy the ebook, and finding value in it, want to share it with the people they know in the same niche. They (at least many think this way) get more social value out of just sharing a digital copy of your work, instead of pointing their friends to buy it. If you flip this model, and ask for money upfront for the upcoming content, the same person who has donated will now be more inclined to find others to donate too, so that the content will actually get created (this is why Kickstarter's pledge minimums work to motivate sharing). Of course, in addition to getting the content among the first, they can get other perks. By all means you can consider this pre-sales or pre-demand instead of crowdfunding. But that's going into the CF model in general. If people benefit from a new platform like this and it creates more copyright-free content while supporting the creators of such content, as far as I'm concerned it's successful.