Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research's The New Sharing Economy study released today indicates that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources such as cars and bikes, largely because they are learning to trust each other online. And they're not just sharing to save money - an equal number of people say they share to make the world a better place.
The research was prompted by a recent surge in sharing startups driven by social technology, a generational shift, and new consumption patterns brought on by economic and environmental crisis. Two new books, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption and The Mesh, argue that this trend is part of a fundamental shift from an ownership to an access economy. They document the rapid growth of the sector and its reach into an increasing number categories of shared use including office space, travel accommodations, textbooks, kids clothes, parking spaces, garden plots, private planes, camera lenses, luxury handbags, boats, household items, and more.
These new services offer citizens use of an asset without the burden of ownership. With a sharing economy comes the promise of cost savings, stronger communities, environmental conservation, broader access to resources, and higher quality products made for sharing. Sharing addresses many problems at once - an appropriate solution for an era of interconnected crises.
Latitude and Shareable's The New Sharing Economy is an early if not the first survey of changing attitudes and behaviors driving this trend. There are a number of helpful findings for sharing entrepreneurs including:
- Sharing online content is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline too. 78% of participants felt that experiences they've had interacting with people online have made them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers. In fact, every study participant who shared content online also shared various things offline. Sharing entrepreneurs are already taking advantage of this by seeding their services in contextually relevant online communities. For instance, online kids clothing exchange thredUP build relationships with prominent mommy bloggers to speed their launch.
- 75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase in the next 5 years. While fast growing, this new sector has lots of unmet demand. More than half of all participants either shared vehicles casually or expressed interest in doing so. Similarly, 62% of participants either share household items casually or expressed interest in doing so. There's also high interest in sharing of physical spaces for travel, storage, and work - even with complete strangers.
- The most popular perceived benefits of sharing (67% each) were “saving money” and being “good for society,” echoing the “me+we” mentality popular amongst Millennials and offering insight on how to brand sharing services. People increasingly expect that saving money needn’t come at the expense of doing good, so gravitate to solutions like sharing that enable them to do both. In addition, two thirds of participants said they were more likely to share their belongings if they could make money from it. Brands should align with this "doing well by doing good" world view.
- Car sharers share across significantly more categories than non-car sharers – 11 versus 8 categories. Ironically, the very thing that catalyzed consumer culture may be the vehicle into the sharing economy. Carsharing preceded the recent surge in sharing startups, and apparently car sharers are leading the behavior shift into a sharing economy. The finding suggests that once someone tries a sharing service they're more likely to begin sharing in other areas of their life. With this in mind, sharing enterprises would do well to seek partnerships with carsharing and like services, seek out users of other sharing services as new customers, and begin offering other items to share once established in a category.
These and other findings are covered more fully in the below report. The survey of over 500 web users was designed to uncover actionable insight to help sharing entrepreneurs grow their social enterprises. Latitude and Shareable will be sharing more about the study in three more posts over the next week or so. Stay tuned.
This one of four posts on our study:
- Learning to Trust Each Other, Online and Off
- Study Reveals Big Opportunities in The Sharing Economy
- The New Sharing Economy (full text version of PDF report)
Comments
@ronjdub wrote on 10.06.10, 1:09pm:
Love the trend and completely agree! Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus also offers up an interesting framework that is useful for not just the idea or IP economy but the Access Economy or sharing economy as well. Whether due to Millenial pre-conditioning or pre-disposition for openness rooted in online behavior, I think the long term mixed of 'owned' vs. 'accessed' assets will look super different from what it is today.
Really exciting to see so much energy in the space yielding sustainable, operationally viable ways to support and promote richer more 'we'-centric living. In fact much like how collaboration around ideas has lead to wonderful and unexpected permutations of thought, I think more collaborative sourcing of resources and perspectives will yield something similar for the physical-world.
I actually spoke about the parable of "stone soup" at the DUMBO Arts Festival a couple of weeks ago on this topic (http://snap.gd/4ev).
Sarah Noack wrote on 10.06.10, 9:21pm:
Great reflections... I actually wanted to do an entire post on my experiences with Facebook resource sharing. I paid half my rent last month thanks to a response to a woebegone Facebook post about some late paychecks. FOUR friends sent significant donations... friends I haven't seen in over 15 years. In return, I sent them material gifts from my own resources. I helped a friend get an infected tooth filled once. I never met her "in real life," but we are friends.
Social media is a fantastic "community chest" medium for resource sharing. Money, legal and professional advice, art, and even used baby clothes get exchanged among my almost 400 friends. It's fantastic. Miraculous.
"This city transcends not only borders and nations, but space and time. When I walk through its streets, I experience all my life—past, present, future—at once in my mind. Memories overlap and become real."
– Sarah Noack, from City of Dreams
Josh wrote on 10.07.10, 4:37am:
Hey, really fantastic resource here! thanks for putting it together and sharing!
look forward to the rest of this weeks articles on the subject...
-josh
ScottK wrote on 10.08.10, 8:43am:
Don't mean to be a wet blanket, but I'm not sure how seriously this can be taken? There's not much concrete in the results summarized within the body of the post - it's a "felt", "believed", "perceived" and "predicted". None of that is real. I'm sure there are real hard facts buried somewhere within, but in the end all this tells is that 65-75% of some select (probably skewed) group of people "feel" that this shift is occurring, but that doesn't mean it really is.
But presuming this shift is really taking place, there are also issues to consider. At some point, conflict will arise - three people sharing a car all need it tomorrow for very important reasons - which will then required a mediator (can't we all just get along?), which then gives rise to a dictator (only one person can have it tomorrow - I dictate it's you - who happens to be special/privileged/connected or otherwise favored).
Sharing is good. It's nice. And if small groups of people can get together and agree to share and make it work, that's wonderful. The danger is when someone decides that they have the power or authority, for the good of "we", to decide to force this mechanism on somebody - or everybody.
Rikomatic wrote on 10.08.10, 12:31pm:
Very interesting study. But correlation does not equal causation.
It is just as plausible that people who are more likely to share in real life also engaging in sharing activities online, rather than the online sharing activities "spurring" more offline sharing.
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 10.08.10, 4:16pm:
I appreciate the critical look at the study. A crucial point here is that the study doesn't claim to conclusively prove causation nor is that the goal of the study. The purpose is to uncover insight helpful to those who want to or have started sharing enterprises.
Aside from the study, I don't think it's a stretch to say that media can change practices on the ground. It would be hard to argue that TV and advertising had no role in the growth of consumer culture in the 20th century.
In fact, the argument made in the newly released book, What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, is that a new set of communications technologies are resulting in a new pattern of consumption (more sharing). It's a great read if you want to learn more about the trend. The Mesh is also good.
Kim Gaskins wrote on 10.09.10, 6:24am:
Rikomatic,
That's a valid concern. Correlation vs. causation confusion is something I always look for when the popular media interprets research.
I want to say first that proving causation wasn't our goal and, at most, the report conceptualizes online sharing as a "good predictor" of offline sharing; people who shared personal content or digital media online were significantly more like than those who didn't to share offline as well. However, it doesn't seem like we'd be overstepping to suggest something of a linear progression (en masse) in our current ownership-oriented society: sharing online (both personal/informational content and digital media) is much more common than sharing things offline, especially in such an organized fashion. Put simply, thanks largely to the rise of social media, online sharing is just extremely prevalent—really a societal norm at this point. (An overwhelming number of people shared personal content and digital media online, but no single category of "offline" shareable goods really stuck out.) I think that's largely because there are still a lot of trust concerns when it comes to sharing physical objects and spaces.
Attitudinally speaking, the study more directly makes the connection with this data point: 78% of participants felt
their online interactions with people have made them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers. Behaviorally, the same percentage have used local online platforms like Craigslist and Freecycle, which are focused on sharing offline (by virtue of their local-ness). The underlying suggestion made by the study is that technology/online platforms are enabling offline sharing to connect people (and their things) intelligently on really broad scales in a way that just wasn't possible before Web, mobile, real-time, and location-aware technologies—and we *postulate* that people are psychologically willing to go that route because of our trusting interactions in online communities comprised of "strangers" over the last several years. Intuitively, that makes sense, and the data supports those ideas even if it doesn't prove causation, strictly speaking. (Those experimental scenarios are difficult to come by, if not impossible at times.)
Jeff Mowatt wrote on 10.10.10, 9:44am:
An interesting blog on the transition of business from product centered to sharing and people-centered.
http://forwardfound.org/blog/?q=comparing-business-development-paradigms
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 10.10.10, 3:02pm:
Thanks for the cool link Jeff!
All, this is a terrific discussion. I hope you'll drop by for the global asynchronous chat with Rushkoff starting 9am PST 10/13 through 10/14 on Shareable. Look for the interview with Rushkoff, the chat will be in comments of that post. Or follow us at @ShareableDesign for the announcement of the chat.
Charlotte wrote on 10.10.10, 4:13pm:
Really interesting discussion. From a personal point of view I'm really excited and optimistic about the way online social tools can help people connect in their local area (I'm setting up a lending service called The Social Library). A lot of the time people just need excuses to talk to 'strangers'. Websites that help people identify common interests and reasons to talk can help get this ball rolling.
I've been intrigued to see a number of new sharing sites launching over the last 12 months... Share Some Sugar and NeighborGoods in the US and Ecomodo and Street Bank in the UK. To me it seems there is a trend forming - certainly for people to setting up sites to cater for the sharing 'idea'. Time will tell if these will be sustainable and generate adequate numbers of users. And the same goes for the enterprise I'm starting up.
What I would say is there is a lot of goodwill for these sites, it's an easy sell - people like the idea of it and want it to work. People generally like the idea there being a sense of community in their area - on a very basic level it makes them feel safer. Bring sharing 'stuff' into the equation, and people feel supported and therefore happier in their neighbourhood. In reality, and again using my personal experience, when it comes to meeting someone from the internet to share something with - it does feel a little daunting (and this is even though I'm a massive advocate of it). It only takes one bad experience to put a person off for good. What people developing these tools need to think about are ways that we can safeguard the users and help them gain trust. Simple things like obligatory profile photographs and systems for verifying addresses/home phone numbers (like ebay) are good. I'm looking into very simple (and hopefully non-intimidating) guidance notes on how to share safely too.
I'm looking forward to seeing what happens for us all. Thanks for sharing the post.
Jeff Mowatt wrote on 10.10.10, 11:18pm:
Neal, something else here from a short while ago where I relate the "fundamental predicate" of non-disposable humanity of what we call people-centered economic development.
The term people-centered economics shows up later in some surprising places.
http://socialbusiness.socialgo.com/magazine/read/you-me-we-ethics-and-pe...
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Scott Bechtler-Levin wrote on 10.26.10, 9:19pm:
Thanks for doing the study and drawing the correlations.
Over the past two years of running www.IdeaEncore.com, an online knowledge marketplace for nonprofits and those who serve them, we have found that despite the growing sharing of materials online - - it is primarily the sharing of materials that always were or always intended to be shared. But there is a tremendous amount of knowledge that COULD be shared and would certainly help many more people if it was shared.
We focus on the nonprofit sector. Even though all nonprofit organization are intended to be public benefit focused, the issues of "Time", "turf", and "trust" persist. Our system uses incentives like recognition and earned income to overcome the inertia and active fears of sharing.
It continues to be a fascinating experiment and would welcome insights from others with experience with other collaborative consumption or collaborative sharing models.
Anna wrote on 11.08.10, 11:48am:
I'm currently working on a paper that discusses, in part, how the emerging culture of sharing may effect people's living arangements. The study paints an interesting picture and indicates a degree of willingness to share that I don't (yet) see reflected in American culture at large. I'm curious about how the sample of individuals was selected. Are they Sharable subscribers? Do they occupy a certain socio-economic group? Do they live primarily in urban areas? I apologize if this information is available somewhere online; I haven't been able to track it down.
I'd appreciate any feedback from Neal or Kim. Many thanks.
Kim Gaskins wrote on 12.08.10, 11:46am:
Anna,
I'd be happy to discuss with you. You can email me at kgaskins[at]latd[dot]com.
Thanks for being interested in the topic!
Kim
David Illig wrote on 05.17.11, 1:37pm:
Interesting study.
In reading the coments, it is clear that we need to becareful about ascribing causation to these identified associations and we need to both examine the samples, time periods and other factors associated with the study. Some independent analyses of Facebook and other social media users would help understand the population and trends.
Having said this, I think it is fair to use the study to form some preliminary hypotheses about the study's results.
Moreover, I find the results potentially very interesting; but, I believe it's too early to jump to public policy prescriptions based on the study.
Keep up the work and encourage others to draw different samples or to develop some experiments to test your hypethoses.
"Basic human needs such as food and shelter are fundamental human rights; there are more than enough resources available to go around--if we can just figure out how to share. It cannot be "Me first, mine first"; rather, "Me, too" is more the order of the day."
That was the last sentence in a white paper for a new model of people-centered economics presented to President Clinton in 1996.
My blog below is about the ethical argument upon which this is based - you, me, we, ethics and people-centered economics.
http://tinyurl.com/24pe3gh