Kickstarter's new Spotlight page gives an afterlife to successful campaigns

Kickstarters are a big deal for small projects, especially when those projects are successfully funded. That original campaign page becomes a landmark on the internet, a gateway for those interested in a given creator's work to find them in the future. So Kickstarter is changing the way those pages look with a new feature called Spotlight.

Spotlight pages will become the home for successful projects on Kickstarter, and offer a dynamic, evolving set of tools to allow creators to keep the information about their work flowing. Instead of a dead campaign page, Spotlight will be a living source of information.

"Once the funding is over Kickstarter project pages are really just static relics of what they looked like on the day their campaign ended," Kickstarter's Justin Kazmark told Polygon. "Starting Wednesday, that changes. The 80,925 successfully funded projects to-date will have complete creative control over a permanent showcase that allows them to celebrate the latest part of their journey."

Here's what a campaign page looked like the day it ended.

Now here's the new version using Spotlight.

Spotlight pages feature a big friendly button to direct visitors off the Kickstarter site, anywhere the creator wants to send them. That could be an Amazon link for their product, a Steam page for their game, or the new home for their fledgling company. It also adds a timeline feature. Instead of digging through a pile of updates, layered behind the original Kickstarter campaign, Spotlight puts the story of a project front and center.

"We know a creator's Kickstarter page is often core to the identity of the project they brought to life from our platform," Kazmark said. "It's often a top search result for artists and entrepreneurs, so it's an important part of how their audience interacts with them and the story they share about themselves and their work after funding. Our mission is to help bring creative projects to life. That means allowing them to live on and breathe. Spotlight is a way to do that."

You can learn more about the changes on Kickstarter's official Spotlight announcement.