Approach for investigating crowdfunding campaigns with platform data: case indiegogo

Abstract

Crowdfunding via the internet is a relatively new phenomenon in research and gaining momentum currently. While taking a data-driven approach into investigating the properties and dynamics of crowdfunding campaigns would allow the use of computational social science in investigations on crowdfunding, existing data-driven research on crowdfunding remains very limited. This is particularly true on the level of individual funder data. In this study, we contribute to the empirical body of knowledge on crowdfunding by introducing Indiegogo as a data source and, more specifically, the development and implementation of a crawler and scraper for accessing Indiegogo campaign data, and sharing this openly for other researchers. Due to the extremely dynamic and rapidly increasing amount of crowdfunding data in terms of the number of crowdfunding campaigns and the available investment and individual investor data, we believe our approach is useful for supporting public and open data-driven research, instead of providing merely a static data set.