The Role of Polish Crowdfunding Platforms in Film Productions – An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the better understanding, and in consequence, better development and implementation of crowdfunding projects for filmmaking. This study covers two areas of analysis: project-level research and founders-level (creators-level) research. In the first area, the article presents an analysis of documentary film projects based on descriptive statistics and the clustering of the film projects. In the second area, the paper sheds light on the Polish filmmakers’ attitude to crowdfunding, and this analysis was based on a survey. This exploratory study led to the following conclusions: 1. The descriptive statistics indicate that the ‘average documentary film’ on the Polish market reaches a higher level of funding compared to non-documentary projects, and higher numbers of supporters. 2. The film projects on the Polish crowdfunding platforms can be segmented into six clusters. 3. The survey conducted among Polish filmmakers indicates that the experts strongly differed in their views about crowdfunding in general, and specifically, in the crowdfunding for documentary films. Such diversity of opinions and attitudes may be linked to the novelty of crowdfunding and therefore, the experts’ difficulty of assessing the present and future role of crowdfunding for filmmaking. 4. This study shows that over 85% of experts agree with the sponsor’s involvement with film production. Such a high level of expert agreement is important as nowadays ‘being a prosumer’ is one of the major trends of consumer behavior.

Keywords: Film production, crowdfunding, film financing

JEL Classification: C30, L30, M31, Z10