Economic eastimation of crowdfunding as a type of fund raising

The finance, investments, insurance
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Abstract:

Crowdfunding is a relatively new method of financing projects via the Internet. After its successes in the field of non-profit cultural and social projects crowdfunding is also gaining its popularity in financing startups and local businesses. Thus, along with social and non-profit objectives, crowdfunding has the potential to become an alternative form of financing business projects at an early stage. Today there are more than 1250 crowdfunding platforms. Almost half of all the existing crowdfunding platforms (46%) operate in North America. Crowdfunding in Russia is still in its early stages, and it is not as popular as in America and Europe. Currently, Russia has around 20 crowdfunding platforms. The most popular fields are charity, music, literature, technology, and society. Unlike traditional methods of investing, crowdfunding campaigns collect funds from the public. Typically, the most successful projects receive about 25–40 % of their income from people with whom the author is connected in any way: family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances. The campaign also receives support from strangers. The advantages of this form of funding depend largely on how the project placement is organized within the platform and how the economic gain is estimated. The solution of this problem is presented in this study. We have considered crowdfunding as a new method of investment financing. The technique of assessing the organization of crowdfunding has been worked out. The technique includes substantiation for business ideas (writing a business plan), an assessment of crowdfunding (pricing of various sources of financing), introduction of the project on the crowdfunding platform (algorithm), an assessment of the profitability of crowdfunding in comparison with alternative sources of financing (cost-saving calculation) and risk assessment of the crowdfunding campaign (assessment of financial risk by using the mathematical expectation formula). The important point is the determination of the price of crowdfunding, which is calculated from the amount of the financial goal. The financial goal is the amount of funds to be collected over a set period on the crowdfunding platform.