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What’s the future of crowdfunding in Asia?

SINGAPORE — Crowd-funding may not be a huge deal in the Asian arts and entertainment scene here at the moment, but it will be soon. That’s what Jouko Ahvenainen, a speaker at the 6th Creative Content Production Conference at BroadcastAsia 2015, which will be held in June at Marina Bay Sands, feels.

Singapore film Rubbers was funded by public contributions collected on crowd-funding site, Indiegogo.

Singapore film Rubbers was funded by public contributions collected on crowd-funding site, Indiegogo.

SINGAPORE — Crowd-funding may not be a huge deal in the Asian arts and entertainment scene here at the moment, but it will be soon. That’s what Jouko Ahvenainen, a speaker at the 6th Creative Content Production Conference at BroadcastAsia 2015, which will be held in June at Marina Bay Sands, feels.

Of course, several creatives in Singapore have tapped on crowd-funding as a source of capital. Thanks to Indiegogo, a website based in the United States, film-maker Kenny Gee raised funds for his short film, The Body, as did Han Yew Kwang for his sex comedy, Rubbers, which will open next week. Most recently, director Ken Kwek and Singapore indie band Ugly In The Morning raised funds for the music video to Riot City, the theme song to Kwek’s latest film, Unlucky Plaza, through Australia-based platform Pozible.

Typically, crowd-funding for films, webseries, music, books, apps and games involves offering rewards, from credit mentions to tickets to a film’s premiere to getting free copies of albums, in exchange for donations. Investors looking to make money may also choose to fund projects. But while crowd-funding has been used successfully in the United States for films targeting a niche audience such as Veronica Mars and Iron Sky, the practice is still in its infancy in this part of the world.

Still, it definitely has a growth trajectory, said Ahvenainen, the co-founder of Grow VC Group, a pioneer in digital finance solutions including crowd investing and P2P lending. The self-styled “serial entrepreneur” set up his first business at the age of 16 and his company started dabbling in online investing services in 2009 “even before the word ‘crowd-funding’ was used”, he said.

“We have done quite a lot of business in Singapore and Hong Kong; we have also been involved in some crowd-funding services in India,” Ahvenainen, who used to live in Kuala Lumpur, added.

Crowd-funding is one way to get your project off the ground, but it’s not as simple as holding out your hand and expecting other people’s money to fall into it. One popular misconception about the practice, said Ahvenainen, is that “people think it is so easy; that everybody is invested in my project”. “It might be interesting but most people are very busy and they have opportunity cost,” he said. “So to get time and money from people, you must be more interesting than many other things.”

In that sense, crowd-funding can work as a sort of product testing mechanism. “If you see that there are thousands or millions of people who are ready to put money into this film, it tells you that it would make sense to invest in it,” he said.

Those who invested financially in a project would also be invested emotionally and would also personally market it. “The success of a movie depends very much on what the first people who see it tell others about it,” Ahvenainen said.

Although most of the crowd-funded film projects have been small in scale in Asia, Ahvenainen said the practice is actually picking up in India (with services such as Catapoolt, which works with Bollywood; and Milaap, which crowd-funds for films and documentaries with social causes); and it “will become more and more common” in Asia.

For now, he said Asia is “still behind Europe and the US” in terms of existing finance regulations, but that is changing. “Malaysia has accepted a new regulation for their equity and lending market. I know that in Singapore, the MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) is working for new regulations.”

There already are Singapore-based crowd-funding platforms including Crowdonomic and FundedHere, the latter concentrating on start-ups.

What might crowd-funding look like in, say, 10 years’ time? “If we talk about donation and rewards models, I think there will be more platforms and services in that area, with different foci,” Ahvenainen said. “Kickstarter is now well known — it is a US service but also available now in some other countries. Kapapal is especially for ‘personal crowd-funding’, for people who want to make their own dreams come true.

“There will be specific services for different kinds of things — some more professional, some for personal markets, some focusing on tech, creative content, music, and so on,” he said.

This makes the crowd-funding revolution a “power to the people” movement. Online connectivity already brings people around the world into contact with one another, uniting those with common causes and interests.

“What has happened in many other industries is that e-commerce and the Internet makes it possible for people to make transactions directly, so that there are no middlemen who make money,” Ahvenainen said.

Perhaps most importantly, he added, it “allows each individual to make his own selection so he or she can support something they feel is important or believe in”.

He added: “It powers people to make their own decisions.”

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