Sponsume

» see sponsume.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Sponsume's last archived page is dated 25 January 2015. The last file of any kind captured from the site, an image or a stylesheet rather than a page, comes two days after that, and then the record stops. There is no farewell page and no blog post. The next time a crawler got anything out of the domain was a redirect in July 2018, and the time after that a timeout. A crowdfunding platform that had taken money from strangers on behalf of strangers stopped answering, and neither group was told.

Everything about it was British and early. Steve O'Hear covered the soft launch for TechCrunch on 28 April 2010, describing a London site bootstrapped with friends-and-family money and run by Gregory Vincent, a French former financial analyst and fund manager at M&G Investments. Kickstarter would not open to British projects until the end of 2012. From Turkey this was invisible in a way that had nothing to do with language: the platform took UK projects only at launch, payments ran through PayPal against sterling targets, and the rewards were theater tickets and photography books posted to British addresses.

Wikipedia says the service ceased in 2014. The citation attached to that sentence is the TechCrunch article about its launch, which was published in 2010 and cannot speak to how it ended, and the archive contradicts it outright: the site was serving normal project pages through most of January 2015. The year in the public record for this company is wrong, and it is wrong because somebody needed a date and reached for the only footnote available.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a voucher was for ~

The mechanism at launch was specific. What a backer bought was a project voucher, redeemable against whatever the creator had offered. The rules on what could be offered were drawn tightly, with rewards permitted to be anything except equity and intellectual property rights, which kept the whole operation clear of financial regulation. Targets ran from £200 to £50,000. Sponsume held back a 12.5 percent deposit as security against creators who took the money and failed to deliver, and projects that missed their target refunded backers less the PayPal charges.

It was free to use at launch, with a commission of around 5 percent planned for later. English Wikipedia states a 4 percent fee on successful campaigns and 9 percent on unsuccessful ones, tagged as needing a citation, and no source anywhere corroborates those numbers, so they are left out of this page.

~ the flexible funding turn ~

In August 2013 the company posted an upgrade notice announcing what it called Flexible Funding, deployed on the 13th. Creators could set a minimum funding target below which no money would be debited from backers and no fees charged, which Vincent's post framed as an alternative to the two existing models, all-or-nothing and keep-it-all. The same post announced Spanish, French, German, Dutch and Catalan versions of the site and a push into the European Union along with Switzerland, Canada and Latin America.

That is a company expanding, seventeen months before it stopped. The hard numbers around that period are thin and come mostly from the founder: a press release about the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe says the platform funded more than forty Fringe projects worth around £40,000 in total, and quotes Vincent putting the lifetime figure at about 1,200 projects funded fully or partially. The site's own about page in late 2014 still described an independent venture based in London and listed press mentions from Wired to Le Figaro.

~ dated by a dissolution ~

The only primary document that dates anything here is the Companies House file. SPONSUME.COM LIMITED, company number 06968334, was incorporated on 21 July 2009, nine months before the site opened. Its sole listed officer for the whole of its existence was Gregory Vincent, appointed on the day of incorporation. Its registered office by the end was in Cambridge rather than London. Its last accounts were made up to 31 July 2015, which is six months after the site went quiet, and the last confirmation statement was filed in July 2016.

Then on 9 May 2017 Vincent filed form DS01, an application to strike the company off the register. The first Gazette notice followed on 16 May and the company was dissolved on 1 August 2017. A voluntary strike-off is the tidy ending, the one a director chooses when there is nothing left to argue about, with no administrator and no creditors' meeting. The site had already been gone for two and a half years by the time the paperwork caught up with it. sponsume.com today serves 628 kilobytes of an Indonesian gambling operation that has kept the word Sponsume in its page title.

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