Title: Does first impression count? A look at Indiegogo campaigns on the 'Explore All Projects' page

Authors: Mathupayas Thongmak

Addresses: MIS Department, Thammasat Business School, Thammasat University, 2 Prajan Rd., Pranakorn District, Bangkok, 10200, Thailand

Abstract: This work investigates the main page of crowdfunding (CF) campaigns and examines the impact of potential determinants of CF projects regarding thumbnail images, project categories and project descriptions. Campaigns on the second-largest reward-based CF platform (Indiegogo) are explored. The campaign details together with their success measures in terms of backed amount and backed percentage are gathered from 311 CF projects. Descriptive statistics, word clouds, tree maps, and hierarchical regression analysis were used to analyse data. The results highlight that project timing and main category play a key role in influencing funding success. This paper provides useful implications for campaign owners in choosing a project category and reveals the popular project category, the most-funded category, the most-used project tags/sub-categories, and the main content embedded in the project's thumbnail. This is one of the first empirical studies that explore the first impressions on the main/search pages on CF project success.

Keywords: reward-based crowdfunding; Indiegogo; project information communication; campaign success; thumbnail images; project category.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEB.2024.137688

International Journal of Electronic Business, 2024 Vol.19 No.2, pp.181 - 208

Received: 26 Dec 2022
Accepted: 21 Aug 2023
Published online: 02 Apr 2024 *

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