The Many Faces of Crowdfunding: A Brief Classification of the Systems and a Snapshot of Kickstarter

In this chapter, we present the complex phenomenon of crowdfunding and its origin, briefly providing some useful definitions and concepts. We then present two different types of analysis: (i) a simple descriptive statistics showing interesting results about the most successful categories of Kickstarter campaigns; (ii) the potentials of adopting a time-series analysis approach to better understand trends in Kickstarter and to perform a simple forecast of future trends of successful campaigns.