The Unstoppable Rise Of The Share Economy
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“This is a movement as important as when the web browser came out.”
Airbnb | YouTube
Tomio Geron | Forbes
“In 20 years we won’t be able to imagine a world where we didn’t have access to things through collaborative consumption.”
Frederic Larson spends his time teaching at Academy of Art University with occasional lecturing gigs in Hawaii. But Larson is also a data point in an economic revolution that is quietly turning millions of people into part-time entrepreneurs, and disrupting old notions about consumption and ownership.
Twelve days per month Larson rents his Marin County home on website Airbnb for $100 a night, of which he nets $97.
Four nights a week he transforms his Prius into a de facto taxi via the ride-sharing service Lyft, pocketing another $100 a night in the process.
He’s now looking at websites that can let him rent out some of his camera equipment.
The “gig economy,” the plethora of microjobs fueled by online marketplaces offering and filling an array of paid errands and office chores.
What Larson finds himself in, however, is something lesser-noticed and potentially far more disruptive–a share economy , where asset owners use digital clearinghouses to capitalize the unused capacity of things they already have, and consumers rent from their peers rather than rent or buy from a company.
Over the past four years at least 100 companies have sprouted up to offer owners a tiny income stream out of dozens of types of physical assets, without needing to buy anything themselves.
The sharing concept has created markets out of things that wouldn’t have been considered monetizable assets before.
A few dozen square feet in a driveway can now produce income via Parking Panda.
A pooch-friendly room in your house is suddenly a pet penthouse via DogVacay.
On Rentoid, an outdoorsy type with a newborn who suddenly notices her camping tent never gets used can rent it out at $10 a day to a city slicker who’d otherwise have to buy one.
On SnapGoods, a drill lying fallow in a garage can become a $10-a-day income source from a homeowner who just needs to put up some quick drywall.
On Liquid, an unused bicycle becomes a way for a traveler to cheaply get around while visiting town for $20 a day.
RelayRides and Getaround, which mimic Hertz or Avis except that the service itself owns nothing. Their fleets, about 50,000 combined at last count, draw from the tens of millions of autos idling in America’s driveways.
Just as YouTube did with TV and the blogosphere did to mainstream media, the share economy blows up the industrial model of companies owning and people consuming, and allows everyone to be both consumer and producer, along with the potential for cash that the latter provides.
Peer-to-peer sharing is moving from an income boost in a stagnant wage market into a disruptive economic force.
Technology has vastly improved on the newspaper classifieds that brokered the sweating of assets for a century.
Ebay’s much-duplicated rating system bestows commercial credibility on individuals.
With Facebook you can go further, checking people’s profiles before renting to them.
Smartphone apps let sharers transact anywhere, see what’s being shared nearby and pay on the spot.
“We’re moving from a world where we’re organized around ownership to one organized around access to assets,” says Lisa Gansky, who started the Ofoto photo-sharing site.
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