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As of 2021, the total worth of the global crowdfunding market amounted to $13.64 billion, by 2028 it was predicted to grow to approximately $28.92 billion, in a compound annual growth rate of 11.2%.1 The success rate of projects fully completed through the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform in 2023 was about 40.34%. Overall, $6.72 billion were used to successfully launch projects with crowdfunding.2
This growth in the use of crowdfunding (Xie et al., 2019) is associated with an increase in the practical importance of Fintech. The relevance of connecting people through digital tools and the development of Web 2.0 were at the center of this approach. In fact, crowdfunding goes beyond the use of traditional financial intermediaries (Belleflamme et al., 2014; Mollick, 2014). Rather, it enables project initiators to use an open call, over the crowdfunding platforms (Koch & Siering, 2019), to collect various tiny individual financial contributions from a large pool of participants (Mollick, 2014) referred to as backers.
In the context of the growing importance of crowdfunding and its multiple web-based platforms such as Kickstarter, GoFundMe, KissKissBankBank, and Indiegogo, previous studies have examined the drivers of crowdfunding campaign success. The available research highlights the improvement of the on-page communication factors cannot be overestimated. Factors such as text description (Kuo et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2018), progress cue (Lee, 2021), videos and photos (Kunz, 2016), contact information (Sokolova & Perez, 2018), and updates and comments (Lai et al., 2017), determine on-page key success through attracting more backers, which can lead to better funding of projects.
Evidence indicates that in order to win interest and trust of the audience, text descriptions frequently seek to elicit emotions through the use of emotion words (e.g., thankful, excited, etc.) (Mitra & Gilbert, 2014). Another important on-page key crowdfunding success driver is the use of stative verbs that express emotions (e.g., to have, hope, promise, etc.) (Lai et al., 2017). In project descriptions, decisive elements are the selected writing style, language, and narrative (Kunz, 2016; Mitra & Gilbert, 2014; Zheng et al., 2014), as all these elements influence campaign success. As argued by Mitra and Gilbert (2014), backers’ interest is very likely to be strengthened by an emphasis on the rarity of the product at stake. The length of text descriptions usually ranges between 550 and 5000 words and includes on average six graphics (Koch & Siering, 2015). And there is evidence that funding success increases with every 1% increase in the length of text descriptions (Zhou et al., 2018).
As noted by Sokolova and Perez (2018), along with monetary needs of a campaign, it is equally important to describe future expenses associated with the fund, as this improves the transparency of a project to its backers (Koch & Cheng, 2016). Similarly, in order to emphasize credibility of a project, contact information should be provided in its description, such as an email address or links to an additional website (Sokolova & Perez, 2018).