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A mass of new data has revealed that global crowdfunding is growing exponentially, doubling every two months, and outstripping Moore’s Law of computing power by a factor of ten.
The first major release of data and analysis from The Crowd Data Center for the first quarter of 2014 reveals that global crowdfunding is consistently doubling every 60 days.
The UK grew faster still in February and March achieving a growth rate of 350% - in March more money was pledged in the UK than in January and February combined.
Welcomed as a landmark in crowdfunding, the report is drawn from a new resource for crowdfunding dubbed ‘The Crowd Data Center’ which aims to become the ‘Oracle’ of crowdfunding, able to answer specific and detailed questions for governments and regulators as well as crowdfunders and all those who advise and support them. It has already collected data from more than 75,000 crowdfunded projects worldwide and grows by thousands more every week.
“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,” said Dr Richard Swart, Global Crowdfunding & Alternative Finance Researcher at University of California, Berkeley.
Barry James, founder of The Crowd Data Center, a new online facility which collected the data which is being launched alongside the report, explained: “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,” said James.
“We've seen the effects of eCommerce and ePublishing. Now we're witnessing the very beginning of eFinance and the eFunding Escalator.”
The inaugural report tracks and quantifies growth through the first quarter of 2014 providing new insights into the nature as well as the size of crowdfunding in the USA, UK and worldwide.
“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,” James confirmed.
The data is essential not only for those crowdfunding projects, but also for the crowdfunding platforms and everyone supporting entrepreneurs and ventures.
Bill Morrow, CEO and founder of Angels Den, says: "The CrowdFundingCentre.com is our go-to for What's happening in the super-dynamic world of crowdfunding.
“Their passion and technical expertise are amazing. We consider them to be at the centre of the ecosystem and our success in angel crowdfunding is in no small part down to their site."
Professor Alan Barrell, Entrepreneur in Residence at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, commented: “This is the first report of its kind and is immensely valuable in providing a mass of real data from more than 75,000 crowdfunds since January 2014 – a feat of a great magnitude in itself.
“While this landmark report is especially important at this time since it answers - from the data - so many of the questions people ask when the word ‘crowdfunding’ is mentioned, it is more than that. The Crowd Data Center itself is now providing an ongoing online resource that can answer pressing questions and keep the world up to speed on what some of us have felt for some time is an unstoppable phenomenon in the making.”
