Success Factors of Crowdfunding Projects – A Cross-Country Comparison between USA, Germany and the UK

Abstract

Crowdfunding as an alternative financing method has been extensively studied for its success factors. However, the current success rates of crowdfunding projects remain below 50%. The aim of this article is to investigate the how number of backers, size of the funding goal, and the team favorite award influence a project’s success and to investigate whether the influence of them differs across countries. Through a statistical analysis of over 100,000 crowdfunding projects sourced from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, projects originating from the USA, Germany, and the United Kingdom were investigated and compared. Number of backers had the biggest impact on project success. For German projects, the influence of backers was significantly higher than in the UK and USA. The size of the funding goal emerged as the most influential factor in UK and Germany, while the team favorite award did not show a significant influential effect in the whole sample.