Archive | Audit Statements RSS feed for this section

Crowdfunding Press Center Releases First Global 100 Crowdfunding Web Site Index

12 Jun

Global 100 Crowdfunding Index Provides Crowdfunding Investor / Crowdfunder Demographic  Information, Website Traffic Statistics, SEO Keyword Search Analytics, and Upstream/Downstream Histories

By Robert Hoskins

Austin, Texas – Despite the SEC’s attempt to slow the equity crowdfunding industry down, every other segment of the crowdfunding industry is breaking records worldwide as small businesses and entrepreneurs are raising billions of dollars to get their business ideas and creative projects off the ground.  If fact, by the time the SEC finally issues their formal guidelines, it may be too late to get small businesses interested in turning over any equity at all.  Why give up any control of your business, when you can successfully raise $10,000,000 through rewards-based, perks-based or donation-based crowdfunding campaigns? [Click to Tweet]

Click on the web site traffic links below to research potential crowdfunding websites and their ability to reach your crowdfunding PR campaigns desired target audience.

If your site is not listed, feel free to contact us and tell us why your site should be listed.  If you need help putting together a crowdfunding marketing campaign for your crowdfunding website or crowdfunding campaign, feel free to contact us.  We also maintain the world’s largest database of crowdfunding service providers.

Source: April 2014 SimilarWeb Website Statistics

[Click to Tweet]

Global Rank 2014 Top Crowdfunding Sites Web Traffic Rank
1 www.kickstarter.com    964  (-244)
2 www.gofundme.com 1,245  (+4,481)
3 www.angel.co 1,274  (+9,683)
4 www.lendingclub.com 2,561  (+11,280)
5 www.fundingcircle.com 3,597  (+69,986)
6 www.indiegogo.com 3,711  (-1,361)
7 www.quirky.com 4,661  (+10,336)
8 www.youcaring.com 5,022  (+29,979)
9 www.justgiving.com 6,109  (+5,016)
10 www.giveforward.com 6,370  (+22,619)
11 www.uinvest.com.ua 7,393  (-2,037)
12 www.kiva.org 7,715  (+4,039)
13 www.crowdrise.com 8,311  (+35,678)
14 www.razoo.com 8,995  (+40,736)
15 www.donorschoose.org 9,383  (+55,327)
16 www.fundly.com 9,915  (+59,157)
17 www.pledgemusic.com 11,853  (+35,156)
18 www.crowdtilt.com 13,903  (+76,675)
19 www.firstgiving.com 14,757  (+37,294)
20 www.fundrazr.com 19,265  (+36,105)
21 www.magcloud.com 23,576  (+23,576)
22 www.realtymogul.com 25,956  (+25,956)
23 www.ulule.com 26,412  (+26,412)
24 www.rockethub.com 27,902  (+44,588)
25 www.fundable.com 28,615  (+56,490)
26 www.crowdfunder.com 32,601  (+95,725)
27 www.circleup.com 33,099  (+190,056)
28 www.fundanything.com 35,349  (+71,742)
29 www.fundrise.com 36,797  (+36,979)
30 www.seedinvest.com 41,715  (+430,930)
31 www.rockthepost.com 42,885  (+219,756)
32 www.offbeatr.com 43,967  (+43,967)
33 www.wefunder.com 47,489  (+123,062)
34 www.equitynet.com 48,247  (+587,067)
35 www.gogetfunding.com 61,405  (+78,842)
36 www.pozible.com 62,443  (+2,369)
37 www.slated.com 66,677  (+66,677)
38 www.crowdcube.com 67,493  (+18,583)
39 www.assetavenue.com 68,249  (+68,249)
40 www.fundraise.com 75,650  (+122,645)
41 www.opportunity.org 75,718  (+393,422)
42 www.assob.com.au 77,558  (+386,646)
43 www.givezooks.com 80,405  (+299,806)
44 www.pave.com 81,226  (+444,764)
45 www.peerform.com 83,521  (+994,913)
46 www.ourcrowd.com 88,850  (+308,003)
47 www.pubslush.com 95,418  (+95,418)
48 www.dragoninnovation.com 98,127  (+98,127)
49 www.appbackr.com 100,023  (+105,911)
50 www.crowdemand.com 115,618  (+115,618)
51 www.microgiving.com 115,267  (+585,065)
52 www.wazoku.com 115,402  (+115,402)
New www.flashfunders.com 133,637  (new)
53 www.give2gether.com 128,130  (+655,961)
54 www.seedandspark.com 132,384  (+435,961)
55 www.fundedbyme.com 157,351  (+22,468)
56 www.sterlingfunder.com 162,355  (+2,810,783)
57 www.piggybackr.com 167,853  (+423,875)
58 www.pledgie.com 176,929  (+47,337)
New www.zeczec.com 190,148  (+190,148)
59 www.launcht.com 196,394  (+230,943)
60 www.bolstr.com 235,082  (+805,974)
61 www.geldvoorelkaar.nl 239,031  (+238,031)
62 www.ppl.com.pt 285,111  (+285,111)
63 www.icrowd.com 295,421  (+292,145)
64 www.peerbackers.com 312,398  (+253,364)
65 www.banktothefuture.com 312,498  (+548,122)
66 www.invested.in 344,449  (+253,364)
67 www.symbid.com 386,296  (+22,212)
68 www.growvc.com 433,297  (-163,387)
69 www.somolend.com 433,891  (+408,760)
70 www.faithlauncher.com 447,005  (+438,283)
71 www.crowdit.com 480,625  (+194,246)
73 www.crowdvalley.com 527,534 (+116,320)
74 www.givetobenefit.com 532,139  (+233,567)
75 www.pledgecents.com 540,265  (+3,168,277)
76 www.appsfunder.com 570,311  (-105,800)
77 www.artistshare.com 622,060  (+622,060)
78 www.cMEcompete.com 678,296  (+4,130,838)
79 www.foodstart.com 692,712  (+29,824)
80 www.solarmosaic.com 754,410  (-399,359)
81 www.alumnifinder.com 876,496  (-966,058)
82 www.propellr.com 880,890  (-126,480)
83 www.fundafeast.com 992,504  (+992,504)
84 www.funderhut.com 1,106,925  (+775,099)
85 www.massivemov.com 1,119,512  (-295,027)
86 www.jumpstartcity.com 1,127,431  (+399,385)
87 www.sprigster.com 1,113,545  (+3,001,889)
88 www.crowdhelps.com 1,518,364  (+2,519,368)
New www.crowdfundingpays.com 1,612,636  new
89 www.venturehealth.com 1,743,989  (+15,277,419)
90 www.clickstartme.com 1,791,606  (-894,227)
91 www.techmoola.com 2,000,288  (+848,486)
92 www.fundageek.com 2,376,689  (-4,678,913)
93 www.fansnextdoor.com 2,587,922  (+35,789)
94 www.ArtSpire.org 2,614,373  (+2,682,752)
95 www.crowdfundingbank.com 2,735,695  (-343,103)
96 www.ipledg.com 2,841,472  (-1,375,367)
97 www.dreambank.org 4,727,020  (-854,041)
98 www.startacure.com 3,462,978  (+5,050,952)
99 www.crowdequity.com 4,853,323  (+5,513,168)
100 www.getspringboarded.com 8,005,621  (-3,514,142)

Many readers first visit the Crowdfunding Press Center to learn more about the booming crowdfunding industry and try to get a handle on how to select the best crowdfunding  website to launch a fundraising campaign and learn what it takes to plan a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Launching a crowdfunding campaign is nothing more than a fancy way to describe a typical product/service marketing launch. The only real difference between a crowdfunding campaign and an old-fashioned product marketing/PR launch is the time period for collecting money.

In the past, companies have created new products, built company websites and used marketing, advertising, social networks and PR campaigns to raise awareness among the correct target audience to entice new/existing customers to buy their product or service.

eCommerce or the process of collecting money online is nothing new.  Collecting money or pre-selling a product/service, however, is a totally new concept and seems to be working very well.  Marketers love it because they can actually test demand for a product or service prior to investing a lot of time, effort and money to bring a product to market.

If a crowdfunding campaigns fails, entrepreneurs will actually save a lot of money that would have been invested in a new business that probably would have failed in a couple of years.  If the crowdfunding campaign is a successful and you raise several million dollars, you can bet that venture capitalists and angel investors will be very interested in buying equity stock the old fashioned way.

The one question that everyone wants to get answered is what is the best crowdfunding website to utilize when launching a fundraising campaign.  The answer is simple.  Like advertising or generating publicity in any communications medium, the most important question to answer is who is the desired target audience of donors and what kind of demographics/psychographics can be utilized to create effective marketing messages to convince the masses to donate money to your cause, creative project or new business idea.

Once the target audience has been identified it is easy to target media usage patterns to find the right mix of media outlets needed to achieve both reach and frequency to reach the correct target audience with the perfect message for the lowest cost -per-thousand (CPM). This is how marketeers have been conducting marketing campaigns for almost a century.

In today’s world, reach and frequency is tied directly to search engine optimization (SEO) and social networks along with traditional media outlets.

To help marketing/PR executives as well as crowdfunding campaign managers discover this type of information, we have analyzed what we consider to be the top 100 crowdfunding sites worldwide.  We ranked crowdfunding websites by their global website traffic as well as numerous other analytics including traffic stats, search analytics, audience readership, reviews, backlinks and upstream/downstream websites generating traffic.

It will not take long before media reps, media outlets and website auditing companies jump into crowdfunding market to start providing in-depth research reports, crowdfunding website audit statements and other readership studies that detail their website’s ability to reach the desired pool of investors/donors via their crowdfunding platform or website.

# # #

Fill out this form to add your site:

CrowdBouncer Beta Trials Title III Crowdfunding Compliance Database

13 Mar

By Robert Hoskins

CrowdBouncer a beta trial of its first centralized, API-driven repository of Title III investor information to help Equity Crowdfunding sites ensure compliance with section 302(a) of the Jumpstart Our Businesses Act (JOBS Act). CrowdBouncer is one of the many growing Crowdfunding Service Providers (CSPs) that are rising to the occasion to develop and introduce high technology tools to serve as back-end transactional solutions that will allow Crowdfunding portals to suffice the SEC regulatory requirement to stay within legal compliance of future Crowdfunding guidelines.

CrowdBouncer Beta Trials Title III Crowdfunding Compliance Database

CrowdBouncer Beta Trials Title III Crowdfunding Compliance Database

CrowdBouncer’s business focuses on compliance and other back-end services to help equity crowdfunding portals create compliant user experiences and closing processes that are competitive with broker-dealer operated sites.  The company has filed for patent protection on its proprietary technology and has several follow-on product offerings on its development roadmap, including the ability to generate closing documents and deliver escrow services through a licensed escrow agent on an automated basis through its API.  It has begun partnering with key industry and technology leaders to deliver these services through its API.

Bob Carbone, CrowdBouncer’s founder and CEO, commented: “The JOBS Act is a tremendous potential boon for very early stage companies seeking capital.  However, it impacts crowdfunding portals in a number of ways that constrains their ability to create compliant, uninterrupted user experiences from beginning-to-end of an offering.  Our goal is to provide portals with the necessary tools to compliantly create a 4-click subscription process for investors: create account, review disclosures, sign documents and consents, and fund/checkout. Over the course of the next several weeks, CrowdBouncer will be launching these transactional services to complement the compliance resources of the API.”

Brian Fending, technical co-founder and CTO, commented: “Crowdfunding portals serve both investors and issuers, and can do so with relative ease using our platform in a single API implementation. Providing the right tool at the right time to everyone involved in a transaction is a real challenge – ours are the tools that will enable the market and help to ensure its stability.”

The JOBS Act, which was enacted in 2012, made radical changes to the regulatory environment for private placements so as to allow equity crowdfunding under a new exception, as well as authorizing the use of general solicitation in offerings that continue to rely on Rule 506 of the Regulation D exemption.  As a result, the landscape for private placements will be much more democratized, allowing ordinary investors to participate in private placements and providing entrepreneurs with expanded and more cost effective options for raising capital.

Kickstarter vs. IndieGoGo: Which is the Best Crowdfunding Site and Why?

17 Feb

How to Pick the Best Crowdfunding Sites for Successful Fundraising Campaigns

By Robert Hoskins

In the booming Crowdfunding indsutry, the most important question that every Crowdfunding campaign manager (Crowdfunder) asks themselves is, “which Crowdfunding site is the best platform to launch my fundraising campaign?

Which Crowdfunding platform such as IndieGoGo.com vs. Kickstarter will offer the best chance of success?  Is it better to risk an “all or nothing” strategy with a Kickstarter campaign and hope that it funds 100%, and then pay a commission of 5-percent?  Or is it better to go with an IndieGoGo campaign, where Crowdfunders will be allowed to keep all the money regardless of whether they reach their Crowdfunding goal or not, and then pay a higher 9% commission fee?

These may seem like simple questions, but they will get complicated quick when trying to make a wise, sound financial decision on which Crowdfunding website is best for a given campaign, especially when the there are 900 different platforms from which to chose. And when Title II, Reg. D Equity Crowdfunding becomes legal, they will get even more complex, but we will save that topic for another article.

Here are a few simple questions to help analyze a Crowdfunding portal’s performance to find out which one offers Crowdfunders the best chance of success. Selecting the best Crowdfunding site to launch a fundraising campaign can be boiled to a few simple questions:

1. How much web traffic does a Crowdfunding portal generate?

2. What is the composition of the site’s  target audience demographics?

3. What is the site’s industry reputation?

4. Does the site provide any analytic information on its vertical segment landing pages?

5. Does the site provide any type of audit statement on how many investors the site has registered and the propensity for them to donate or invest a particular industry, product or service?

In the future, all Crowdfunding websites need to provide an industry-standardized Crowdfunding Audit Statement.  Using Google Analytics or other types website traffic analysis tools, all portals know exactly how much web traffic their entire website receives; what landing pages are receiving the most traffic; what search engine keywords are delivering the most donors/investors; and what external websites are referring the most visitors.

This chart is from Alexa.com:

What is the Best Crowdfunding Site? Kickstarter vs. IndieGogo

What is the Best Crowdfunding Site? Kickstarter vs. IndieGogo

This chart is from Google Trends.

What is Best Crowdfunding Website? Kickstarter vs. IndieGoGo Google Trends Statistics

What is Best Crowdfunding Website? Kickstarter vs. IndieGoGo Google Trends Statistics

IndieGogo Crowdfunding Website Statistics Ranking:

IndieGoGo Crowdfunding Website Ranking

IndieGoGo Crowdfunding Website Ranking Statistics

Kickstarter Crowdfunding Website Statistics Ranking:

Kickstarter Crowdfunding Website Ranking Statistics

Kickstarter Crowdfunding Website Ranking Statistics

Kickstarter has a global ranking of all websites on the internet at a ranking of #830 compared to IndieGoGo’s global ranking of #2,422.  In the United States, the largest Crowdfunding donation market in the world, Kickstarter has a ranking of #399 compare to IndieGoGo’s ranking of #1,140.

Another important statistic to review is the number of websites that have links to pointing to Crowdfunding websites, which helps their search engine optimization and places them higher in the search engine results.  Kickstarter has twice as many link backs at 84,130 compared to IndieGoGo’s link backs of 40,720.

Based on the information above, it is easy to see that Kickstarter’s numbers exceed IndieGoGo’s by a large margin.

Last, but not least, we are going to discuss how Crowdfunding sites at the top of pack got to their current position and why every successful business development strategy includes a wide variety of marketing campaigns that are designed to build a profitable sales and distribution channel for the company’s products and services.

If you do a Google search on “Kickstarter,” the search will turn up 25.7 million results.  A search on IndieGoGo yields a 5.5 million search results. How did Kickstarter amass 5 times more coverage and the resulting link backs to their website?    The simple answer is marketing.  The Kickstarter Handbook guides Crowdfunders through a step-by-step process on how to launch a successful crowdfunding campaign.

One of the most important things the book covers is how to use public relations to write a press release and issue it over a professional news wire service such as Businesswire.com, Marketwire.com or PRNewswire.com.   The purpose of a press release is to feed news to a group of reporters on a news circuit or beat.  Every day reporters scan these news wires for potential stories to cover.  Issuing a press release with the word “Crowdfunding” in it will cause a press release to automatically hit every reporters inbox with a Google alert set on the keyword.

All Crowdfunding sites should work with the major news wire services to make it as affordable for their Crowdfunders to issue as many press releases as possible.  Marketwire allows a Crowdfunder to add two URL links to any website related to the press release and each press release is usually picked up by 75 to 100 news outlets.  At 200 link backs per press release issued, it should be easy for any SEO expert to understand why press releases are so important.

A well-written press release combined with an intelligent PR agency that has developed media relations with the 450+ reporters that cover the Crowdfunding beat usually results in several news articles, which provides credibility for the Crowdfunding campaign and a significantly higher rankings for the Crowdfunding portal hosting the campaign.

Kickstarter has done a tremendous job of teaching its customers how to successfully market their Crowdfunding campaigns.  It will be interesting to watch new Crowdfunding platforms as they come on line to see if they can match the marketing prowess of Kickstarter.  All Crowdfunding sites should should offer a Crowdfunding Business Partner program that offer Crowdfunders both an affordable price on issuing press releases as well as a list of PR firms that are willing to help their Crowdfunders launch cost-effecting PR and social media campaigns.

# # #

Click here to setup a 30-minute crowdfunding consulting session.