Crowdfunding Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Evidence from Kickstarter
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Abstract
The aim of this paper was to explore the impact of COVID-19 on crowdfunding using data from the Kickstarter platform. The study period covers the COVID years from March 2020 through 2021 and three years before the pandemic. We crawled data from Kickstarter.com with custom-made software, a scraper robot. The research was based on a sample of a total of 43.977 campaigns, of which 29.5% were started during the COVID era and 70.5% were launched previously. To test our expectation that the characteristics of the campaigns during COVID-19 have changed, we applied a t-test. The results show that crowdfunding created an early response to the COVID crisis, manifested as differences between campaigns initiated during and before the pandemic period. Campaigns initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic had lower goals, much higher amounts of funds pledged, a higher number of backers, higher chances for success, and a shorter blurb description, while they were more frequently chosen as favourites by the Kickstarter staff. The coronavirus is a huge economic burden, particularly for start-ups, entrepreneurs, and small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). As a result, the findings of this study suggest that crowdfunding, as an online option, might help fill in the finance gap during times of crisis.
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