Crowdfunding constitutes a novel distributed online approach for raising capital. It has the potential to restructure the culture industry and sideline traditional gatekeepers such as movie studios or publishers. Entrepreneurs have established a large number of crowd funding sites first in the United States and later in other developed economies. The most prominent of these sites, Kickstarter.com, focuses on creative projects. By early 2014 more than $1 billion had been raised through it. These platforms are a global phenomena. We will study their use in two countries - Israel and the U.S.
We (Roei Davidson and Nathaniel Poor) are studying how creators use crowdfunding platforms and whether they would consider using it again. Davidson is a lecturer in communication at the University of Haifa, Israel. Poor is an independent scholar based in Brooklyn, NY. Both did their doctoral work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Over the past decade Davidson has been studying media and economics. Poor has been focusing on media technologies. Over the coming months we'll be interviewing film-makers, musicians, videogame creators, writers, painters with the aim of finding out what they think about these platforms. We will also conduct an online survey on this topic.
December 2nd, 2014: Our first paper has been published online in the journal New Media and Society(if you do not have full-text access feel free to contact us)Our thanks go out to all those who have already contributed their time to answer our questions online or off!!! If you've received a request to participate in our online questionnaire, please do consider answering the survey! Thank you!
If you have questions or want to participate feel free to contact us.
If you're interested in our theoretical framework, here are some of the key references we use (and of course feel free to contact us as well):
References
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