Appreciating Support – Antecedents of Subscription-Based Crowdfunding Campaign Success

Abstract

Using subscription-based crowdfunding platforms, content creators can transform their social embeddedness from social media websites into financial support and subsequently gain independence from advertisers. This study examines the antecedents of campaign success for subscription-based crowdfunding campaigns and how content creators can use them to run successful campaigns. For this, we crawled a comprehensive data set from the largest and most universally used subscription-based crowdfunding platform Patreon. Our results show that campaign creators should write an extensive campaign description, offer multiple reward levels with a wide span of costs, lividly engage with their community while focusing on postings with a high level of media richness, and use their social media followers to bring their campaign to success. We contribute to previous research by evaluating the effects of crowdfunding campaign characteristics that previous research only hypothesized and by focusing on the novel concept of subscription-based crowdfunding.