The paper – 'eFunding: The State of The Crowdfunding Nation' – shows the global crowdfunding sector to be doubling every two months. The UK topped even that staggering growth rate, expanding by a rate of 350% through February and March. In March more money was pledged to UK crowdfunding projects than in January and February combined. Clearly the UK crowdfunding industry is in the ascendancy, even if it remains dwarfed by the scale of the US rewards-based giants.
“The Crowd Data Center” aims to become the “Oracle” of crowdfunding – with the capacity to provide answers to specific and detailed queries for governments, regulators, crowdfunders and the entire crowdfunding ecosystem. It has already collected data from over 75,000 crowdfunded projects worldwide and continues to grow by the thousands each week.
Dr. Richard Swart, Global Crowdfunding & Alternative Finance Researcher at the University of California,Berkeley, commented:
“This report is a crucial development for our field. With such a fast moving market, growing exponentially, it is extremely important that policy makers, educators and professionals have a resource to track funding patterns. The Crowd Data Center has laid the foundation for a data set that can change the industry.”
Barry James, Founder of The Crowd Data Center, explained the proposition in detail:
“We are now providing an online living-map, a kind of Google Earth for crowdfunding, that is able to give you hard data and answer the specific questions that really matter when planning a campaign, running a platform, thinking about investment strategies or making regulation and legislation.
“No one need be in the dark any longer.
“We already knew, but this confirms, that crowdfunding is an established multi-billion-dollar industry. We now know it is growing at a prodigious rate, what that rate is, and that it rivals and surpasses Moore's Law of computing power that has so transformed business and the global economy, growing at around ten times the rate, doubling roughly every two months.
“We've seen the effects of eCommerce and ePublishing. Now we're witnessing the very beginning of eFinance and the eFunding Escalator.
“We are at the point in time where Big Data meets crowdfunding, whose open-by-default nature lends itself well to that, having already captured around 3 million snapshots and adding more than 22,000 every day.”
You can download the full report here.
