I hadn't even heard of crowdfunding before this, but it sounds like it is important.  Reading the article, I was wondering how much an impact it could really make, then I read the part that said there had been over a million people contribute.  I had to read again to make sure it was not 1 million contributions overall, and it did say 1 million people contributing.  Considering that there were probably people why contributed more than once, this is a huge movement.