Success Factors in Reward based and Equity based Crowdfunding in Finland

 
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https://www.fixura.fi/fi-fi/sijoittaminen/

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Master’s Thesis 
43 
9. Research Findings 
9.1. An Overview of Kickstarter Projects 
Kickstarter is a reward-based crowdfunding platform. They operate on an “all or noth-
ing” rule, meaning if an initiative does not reach its target-funding amount, no capital 
exchanges hands. Their terms of service
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state that: 
- Projects must create something to share with others. 
- Projects must be honest and clearly presented. 
- Projects can’t fundraise for charity, offer financial incentives, or involve pro-
hibited items. 
As a form of transparency Kickstarter publishes funding statistics concerning the pro-
jects initiated on their platform. They provide data informing how many projects have 
been successfully funded and how much funding has been raised by both successful 
and unsuccessful projects. This data is listed according to project category. Kickstarter 
has 15 different project categories – for 15 different industries. 
9.1.1. Number of Successful Projects and Amounts Raised 
In 2014 a total of 529 million US dollars was crowdfunded through Kickstarter. That 
funding amounted to 22252 projects reaching their target funding and being success-
ful. As can be seen from Figure 2, those successfully funded initiatives were divided 
relatively evenly throughout the year, with the exception of a decrease in the number 
of successes in January and February. This would imply that there is no significant 
trend in how many projects are funded in each month. 
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https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use?ref=footer

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Master’s Thesis 
44 
Figure 2: Number of successfully funded projects on Kickstarter in 2014 by month
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The number of successfully funded projects through Kickstarter in 2014 did vary 
quite substantially in relation to category. As can be seen from Figure 3, some catego-
ries produced a much higher amount of successful projects than others. Music and 
Films & Video categories had approximately 4000 successful initiatives each, whereas 
Journalism, Crafts, Dance and Photography only amounted to less than 600 each. 
However, it must be noted that Journalism and Crafts categories were introduces to 
Kickstarter only in June, which likely affected the number of funded projects they 
amounted to. Overall this data clearly shows that some categories are home to a larger 
amount of successfully funded projects than others. 
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https://www.kickstarter.com/year/2014/data?ref=yir2014
1242 1326 
1921 1931 1980 1813 1928 
2311 
1881 
2033 1980 1906 
0 
500 
1000 
1500 
2000 
2500 
Jan 
Feb Mar 
Apr May Jun 
Jul 
Aug Sep 
Oct 
Nov Dec