Online Document Mining Approach to Predicting Crowdfunding Success

Crowdfunding has become more popular than angel funding for fundraising by venture companies. Identification of success factors may be useful for fundraisers and investors to make decisions related to crowdfunding projects and predict a priori whether they will be successful or not. Recent studies have suggested several numeric factors, such as project goals and the number of associated SNS, studying how these affect the success of crowdfunding campaigns. However, prediction of the success of crowdfunding campaigns via non-numeric and unstructured data is not yet possible, especially through analysis of structural characteristics of documents introducing projects in need of funding. Analysis of these documents is promising because they are open and inexpensive to obtain. We propose a novel method to predict the success of a crowdfunding project based on the introductory text. To test the performance of the proposed method, in our study, texts related to 1,980 actual crowdfunding projects were collected and empirically analyzed. From the text data set, the following details about the projects were collected: category, number of replies, funding goal, fundraising method, reward, number of SNS followers, number of images and videos, and miscellaneous numeric data. These factors were identified as significant input features to be used in classification algorithms. The results suggest that the proposed method outperforms other recently proposed, non-text-based methods in terms of accuracy, F-score, and elapsed time.