Kickstarter is a way to avoid financial risks and not give a share in your project.

At present, the Internet is full of success stories, as projects shone on Kickstarter 'e receive several million dollars ( Pebble - $ 7 million, Double fine Adventure - $ 3.3 million). Amounts of several million are really serious investments, it is surprising that this money is not special investment funds, but ordinary citizens.

I always wonder how the teams presenting their projects on Kickstarter make such great promotional videos. Despite the fact that the rollers are simple enough: “Close-up focusing on the project leader, looking into the distance, a lot of aphorisms and cliches, the performance of the whole team, video series with workplaces, incendiary music.”

Promo video works! After watching the video, a person truly falls in love with raw ideas and becomes convinced of the success of a project.

Note that people who invest their money in projects receive first of all satisfaction from the fact that they helped bring the idea to life, and sometimes, if lucky, they get the first working goods / products.
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But not always "home investors" get a realized product, sometimes it is simply impossible, as is the case with the project "Spencer Tunick's Dead Sea Art Installation" . As planned by the author, it was necessary to raise $ 60,000 in order to photograph naked several thousand people in the Dead Sea. Attention attention! This project has collected twice the amount claimed ($ 110,000) and was implemented.

It’s hard to imagine how such a project could raise such a sum, and how the creator would present his idea not to the Internet community, but to real investors who would require a business plan, project rationale and other formalities. Kickstarter - no financial gain, it is something like a charity from a good fairy.

Consider another project, Pebble watch - a clock that is synchronized with your smartphone. But this is not an innovation! Sony has released a similar watch over a year ago. However, something attracted the attention of the public to this idea, allowed to collect 60.5 times more than the stated amount, namely $ 6.5 million.

Judging by the history of the company that launches Pebble, this is not their first project - they have already manufactured and launched similar watches for BlackBerry. Pebble watches are their next development, and they do not have enough financial resources to launch it. In other words, the company went bankrupt in the past, and now it wants to implement a new project by bribing internet users with a good video picture and taking money from them.

Summarizing the above, private investors Kickstarter get satisfaction and sometimes the finished product. But if the product, like Pebble, becomes a failure, they will get a cool dead-born gadget that the creator could realize himself, but, shifting the financial investments to "gullible" private investors, took off the financial risks.

#Addition
Unusual projects that received funding on Kickstarter:

$ 30,000 to the game console museum ($ 50,000 collected)
$ 7,200 on a book about the history of Atari (collected $ 11,500)
$ 2.000 for the game "Puzzles" for the Atari 2600 (collected $ 1400)
$ 1200 on a 200-page book on the history of computers (collected $ 3500)
$ 25,000 to Amiga history documentary ($ 29,000 collected)
$ 1,900 to a party of demos
$ 2,600 to record an album of 8-bit music (collected $ 3,600)
$ 2000 for an album of 8-bit music (collected $ 8600)
$ 3000 for educational game for preschool children to teach algorithmic thinking (collected $ 3000)
$ 400,000 classic point-and-click game (collected 3,300,000).

Several projects dedicated to Russia:

$ 6,000 on a photo album about churches and mosques of Kazan (collected $ 7,300)
$ 7,000 for a film about life in post-Soviet Russia (collected $ 7,500)
$ 5000 for a film about the cult of Pushkin in Russia (collected $ 5040)
$ 1000 on Putin comics (collected $ 1145)
$ 7,500 to record the Russian cellist album (collected $ 8,100)
$ 10,000 for a film about a hair-gathering business in Russia ($ 100 collected)
Sources:

Kickstarter site
Video with the presentation of Spencer Tunick's Dead Sea Art Installation
Pebble Presentation Video
In the preparation of the article used the information from the IT-blog Mashable