It is a method used to crowdfund projects usually. With every project using their own coin/token so that they offer investors a chance if their project gets addopted and used price will raise. Therefore many people see this as a good investment opportunity because you could look at good returns, but price can fall as well and be worthless at end. Before chosing ICO to invest in you should do good reaserch about that matter. It is known that there are a lot of scams related to it, but as well as some great projects. Coin can even represent a stock or anything else company wants.
Even ethereum started of as an ICO, because ethereum was premined by devs and they offered coins in exchnage for mooney to raise funds and develop ethereum that we see now. However with ethereum and some other platforms enable people to create tokens easily and because of people slowl taking notice in the crypto world there were many projects that lunched last year via ICO. This should even raise more today as it can be easy funding from all over the world.
Great explanation of ICO. Thank you for providing what ICO means. I always join bounty program and its really wonderful to be part of a project which is is really meaningful. Love ICO.