Approach for Investigating Crowdfunding Campaigns with Platform Data: Case Indiegogo

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.