Crowdfunding no Brasil: Determinantes do apoio em projetos do Catarse

Abstract

Crowdfunding is a new designation for an ancestral practice, the collective raising of small amounts of money in order to make a project viable. Today, it is organized by digital platforms, which permit complete strangers to participate in projects that would otherwise have few if any chances of success. The purpose of this study is to identify the determinants of support for projects published in Catarse, the main crowdfunding plat- form in Brazil. In addition to analyzing the extant social and technological literature on the so-called Sharing and Gig Economy, this study analyzes approximately 16 thousand projects and 950 thousand registered users through web scraping. Employing a negative binomial multilevel regression, we find that entrepreneurs who plan their communication strategies better attract more support, with the number of updates, the use of alternative communication platforms and the size of project descriptions all being statistically sig- nificant predictors of backing. Several characteristics of the projects are also significant, such as the number of rewards, the duration of the campaign, and the modality in which they are registered. Likewise, several characteristics of the entrepreneurs are relevant, in- cluding personal networks and previous experiences with crowdfunding. Finally, we found that geography plays an important role, as population density and income concentration in cities where projects originate have influence on the number of backers. As a contribu- tion to the field of communications, this work aims to advance the understanding of new social configurations that have emerged in the wake of the internet and to reflect on how research in communications can use tools from other fields to improve their own methods.