An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Online Communication On Crowdfunding Performance

Crowdfunding is an emerging fundraising model that has achieved rapid development due to its outstanding advantages compared to traditional fundraising.However,contrary to the booming development of the crowdfunding market,the success rate of project fundraising on many crowdfunding platforms is relatively low.In order to explore the success secrets of crowdfunding,domestic and foreign scholars have conducted research on the impact mechanism of crowdfunding performance from multiple aspects,and found that communication between creators and backers plays an important role in it.However,there is relatively little research on crowdfunding from the perspective of changes in the communication form.At the same time,while browsing the crowdfunding platform,this article noticed an interesting phenomenon.In the 2022 Indiegogo crowdfunding project update area,comments and emotional expression functions were added,which means that the communication form has changed from one-way to two-way.In the process of exploring the impact of changes in the project update form on crowdfunding performance,this article found that changes in the communication form can affect the communication behavior of creators.Therefore,further analysis was conducted on literature related to creator communication behavior.Previous studies have regarded crowdfunding projects(even those initiated by the same creator)as independent and conducted from the same level,ignoring the cross-level characteristics of social capital accumulated by the creator in communication,which can lead to incomplete and unscientific understanding of crowdfunding.This article provides a more accurate overview of the impact mechanism of communication behavior on crowdfunding performance through research on online communication from different perspectives,which has certain theoretical and practical significance.In order to explore the impact of communication between creators and backers on crowdfunding performance,this article takes Indiegogo,a reward based crowdfunding platform,as the research object.The corresponding data was captured using a Python crawler program and the internet crawler tool "Octopus Collector",and empirical research was conducted.Firstly,data from the control and experimental groups before and after the change in communication format in 2022 were captured,and a total of 7842 projects were subjected to quasi natural experiments to study the impact of the communication format change between creators and backers on crowdfunding performance.The research results indicate that the change in communication form from one-way to two-way in the update area has a positive impact on crowdfunding performance,and the number of project updates partially mediates this impact.In addition,this change promotes the creator to create project updates.On the basis of this research result,this article captured data from 2394 creators and 6286 projects they initiated.A hierarchical linear model was used to analyze the cross-level effect of social capital accumulated by creators in communication(total comments)and its cross layer moderating effect.The impact of online communication(updates and comments)and quality signals(videos and images)on crowdfunding performance was also considered.The research results indicate that the total number of comments from the creator has a positive cross-level impact on project funding ratio;The total number of comments by creators positively moderates the relationship between comment count and fundraising ratio from a cross-level perspective,while also enhancing the positive impact of image count on fundraising ratio.Only when moderating the relationship between update count and fundraising ratio is negative;The more updates and comments a project receives during the fundraising process,the larger the number of videos and images,and the higher the fundraising ratio at the end of the project.