It doesn't seem all that novel to me. They're just changing the source of their revenue from ads to Kickstarter.

You could argue that this lets them be freer with their art and writing, since they won't have to worry about offending their advertisers, but has that ever been an issue for them in the past? (The closest thing I can think of would be the Strawberry Shortcake comic, but that wasn't an ad-related issue.)