The Role of Online Crowdfunding Communities in Funding Cycle Success: Evidence from Kickstarter

• Autor(a) principal: Ana Alexandra Ramalho Mateus
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/85195
• topic: Outras ciências da engenharia e tecnologias; Other engineering and technologies

Crowdfunding platforms are a great funding opportunity for all entrepreneurs. Thanks to the development of digital technologies and the difficulties in attracting funding from traditional sources of financial backing, the sourcing of financial goods through the Internet has seen strong growth in recent years. Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms, has helped fund over 99521 projects, in the last 6 years across 15 different project categories. In spite of the platform's rapid growth - number of projects and funding goal amounts - the success rate of projects has been decreasing: 41% in 2011 to 36.3% in 2015. To have a successful funding cycle, entrepreneurs need to leverage their promotional skills and their network actions. Previous crowdfunding research has shown how the entrepreneur's social network ties, may positively affect their ability to reach the desired funding goal. But how does their built network inside the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, impact project performance, and how does its influence change from one project category to the next? Kickstarter lets entrepreneurs engage with an audience of possible backers - project creators can post project updates, can write comments and back other creators' projects. Those interchangeable roles - project creators can be backers and vice-versa - create sub communities of users where network dynamics such as network visibility, social obligation and reciprocity play a vital role in funding cycle success By comparing behaviour data of creators across all project categories (Art, Comics, Crafts, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Journalism, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, Theater) this work will analyse the varying importance of community development within those different categories. This involves collecting data from 85574 project creators and 138550 successful and unsuccessful projects from crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, using a scraper algorithm, and then analysing statistically the data across all creation, backing and network variables across all project categories. Finally a qualitative analysis of will be performed by conducting a set of interviews to 6 selected project creators. Even though previous studies have confirmed the value of the internal social capital within crowdfunding communities, they have not analysed its influence across multiple categories, determining how it may be beneficial to funding cycle success. It is expected that the type of network actions allowed inside Kickstarter may not affect the outcome of funding cycles within certain categories but be crucial in others.