Actually, no. Money is hard to come by at the best of times, especially for 'unsafe' things - Johnny

Fame doesn't necessarily equal money. However, it's true that some of the famous folks have money and could self-fund. But as some industry comedian once said "Never invest in the show yourself!" - Spidra Webster

Or to put it another way, 'Famous' doesn't equal 'Rich'. Snookie is famous, but I'm not giving her $1,000,000 to do a doco on tanning. - Johnny

I'll give you an example from my day today: I've written an entire webkit-based site for our customer for free (to ultimately help my company sell more products). I'm famous inside that company as the 'Guru'. I do all their marketing, their promotional stuff, IT support, event management. The international sales manager of their parent company in the States even knows me and I have been mentioned in the board rooms of that multi-billion dollar company for what I'm doing in Australia for them in terms of social media and QR code development... But you could think I could get them to spend $35 a year on some web hosting for that webkit site? My head is bloody from banging it against the brick wall all morning - Johnny

I guess, but that seems more like a red tape issue than influence. Our team leads at work have the solutions to a lot of our problems, but the process there involves no one above listening. My issue in this case is that "famous" has the clout and reach that someone with an equally quality project does not. Louis C.K. could do a kickstarter and have it be successful because he is already famous. Joe-Shmoe may never reach his goal despite hard work and savvy social media'ing. - Jonathan Hardesty

Not saying "famous" can't have their kickstarter campaigns...but why not just put a big donate button on a google blog and wait for the money to roll in? Last I checked, fandom and their money part ways super fast. - Jonathan Hardesty

Just another fame monetization strategy. - Todd Hoff

Plus, crowdsourced funding lets a creator get, say, $100k or more by aggregating small "investors" who get credit or a digital download, rather than one big investor who wants some creative control. - Andrew C (✓) from Android

The only problem is the vast majority of people who donate to a kickstarter campaigns do so after they hear about it from a 'famous' person or source. So famous people can promote a campaign but not run it? Sounds a bit odd that their influence should be restricted in such ways. - Johnny