A review and comparison of crowdfunding in developed and developing countries

Crowdfunding, an alternative financing method used especially by entrepreneurial individuals or small businesses to fund start-ups and entrepreneurs, is defined as a way of individuals to obtain ideas, feedback and solutions to improve their corporate activities with a distributed network. Crowdfunding, which has emerged as a remarkable and popular alternative financing channel in recent years, especially in America and Europe, has just started to become widespread in our country. In this study, first of all, information on the concept of crowdfunding, its development, usage examples in the world and crowdfunding platforms were synthesized in the light of the existing literature. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the factors affecting the success of crowdfunding. In this context, successful and unsuccessful projects that call for crowdfunding (reward-based crowdfunding) funds were examined and the factors affecting the success and failure of these projects were investigated within the framework of signal theory and social network theory. The data subject to the research was accessed through crowdfunding platforms (kickstarter, fongogo, arikovani, crowdfon) in Turkey and the USA, and examples of successful and unsuccessful projects from the two most preferred sectors (film and technology) and two countries were examined. Through the specified crowdfunding platforms, project-related (project web page, project description character length, project's video, video duration), funding (number of award, funding period, targeted fund amount, funding period, maximum and minimum investment amount) and the project owner (gender, education, age, experience, social network-Instagram/Twitter/Linkedin status of the project owner) were obtained. Data on 60 successful and 60 unsuccessful project examples were subjected to logistic regression analyses. Although the results of the research differ on the basis of country and sector, in the logistic regression analysis models including all data, the factors that significantly affect the success of the projects, the length of the project description, the number of characters, the funding period, the maximum and minimum investment amounts, the number of awards, the project owner whether there is information, whether there is a video on the project page, having an external web page of the project owner, and having one of the project owner's Instagram, Twitter or Linkedin accounts. The study contributes to the literature by pioneering in terms of being a study that empirically examines the success factors of projects that try to raise funds using crowdfunding, and examines the factors that lead to possible success / failure within the scope of two developed and developing countries.