This sounds like a good idea. I personally don't know much about either crowdfunding or how easy/difficult it would be to collect the data. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has experience with either of these things though.

For example one question I would have is that I normally think of crowdfunding being for a one-shot project. This seems like it would have ongoing expenses like Wikipedia. How easy/difficult would it be to fund this project over a long period of time?

keep going Shadow, i'm with you

Seems farfetched

If there's no profit motive, this kind of thing seems unlikely to work. It probably wouldn't work even with a profit motive.

Might be an idea. But it bears some questions:

1. How much money would be needed to start the tracker?
2. How much money would be needed to keep the tracker alive and the numbers coming?
3. What incentives can you give to potential backers to fund the tracker?
4. Only US? What about other regions? Maybe at a later date?

As a Kickstarter Superbacker, I can say that Kickstarter is viable as long as you have the right incentives for your backers and don't place the bar too high since it's an all-or-nothing system. But I'm not sure if x months of Supporter badges for a discounted price will be enough of an incentive for that. Might need some more merch (Tees, Stickers, Buttons, whatever...) to make it viable for Kickstarter.

But in any case, this would need continual funding. So instead of Kickstarter (or after a Kickstarter/Indigogo/GoFundMe/similar site) campaign to start the tracker, I'd suggest more something like Patreon to get a guaranteed monthly money flow.

I have a better idea. Let's make up total BS numbers, and present them as accurate. Then we can see how many half-ass journalists, streamers, and bloggers refer to them as though our fake numbers are legit.

Not a bad idea. There have been certainly worse ideas on kickstarter that got massive funding. Problem I see is that you would have to get an insider. Like someone that worked for NPD for a long time or something to get ball rolling. It is all about connections.

I would also imagine NPD has deals with companies to collect their data.  I'm sure they'll probably try to prevent someone else taking their spot.  Then, you have the companies that might not want their sales numbers out their to prevent a PR disaster. A lot of hurdles to overcome.

What about Patreon. I think it is geared more towards artists and content creators but this would be content of a sort.

edit- baa I had the tab open since last night so hadn't seen bofferbrauer2's post suggesting the same thing. Also been a long time since I'd been here looks like a few things have changed when it comes to posting.

VGChartz was the right concept. Gather the data and post them on your own website which is the money generator.
Things were going very well and the accuracy was increasing year over year from 2007-2010 and then I don't know what happened and everything fell apart. Either ioi was trying too many things with the website back then, data base, Pro site, another website, paid writers and other things, and it backfired or he got too busy with other work.

If someone can replicate that concept and improve on the accuracy it would be great and could help you get investors. You can get people like ioi to advise you on how to gather data, what worked and what didn't and what were the things that prevent him from being a credible source of data. You can promise people like him advisory shares.