I am currently running a Kickstarter campaign and I must say that this is far from being a trend. The run away success campaigns have a track record and a following, which is leveraged to create the initial PR push. Without hitting 20% funding very early on the project has very little chance of succeeding (kickstarter stats).

A lot of our pledging happened from traffic coming directly from Kickstarter. My guess here is that people that come to Kickstarter have an intent to back and they become shoppers. User lands on one cool project, gets excited, browses, which leads to other projects being discovered and potentially backed as well.

At the end of the day, it's a funnel and your project has to be discovered in order for some users to convert to backers. It's also about connecting your project with the right audience. By cutting out Kickstarter you cut out a large portion of users that are more likely to convert, reducing chance of initial social sharing, crazy trends that create press stories, etc. This is why I don't think this is a trend.