It’s been interesting and busy year of coverage on the collaborative economy with over a few thousand articles written about the space.
While this new movement is still in its early stages, we can now see a shift in articles discussing not just its many monikers or new verticals i.e. ‘the new Airbnb for X ‘ but we are seeing much needed discussion around tougher issues such as trust, ethics, regulation and worker rights that need to be addressed.
We have selected a few articles to cover the different sides of the space, its pros and cons and also specific themes that have arisen in news coverage this year.
Boom and Backlash
The UK sharing economy could rake in £9bn by 2025
Rachel Savage, Management Today
PwC has said sharing economy companies could be making £9bn a year in the UK and $335bn globally by 2025, up from an estimated £0.5bn and $15bn today.
Loans That Avoid Banks? Maybe Not
Amy Cortese, New York Times
The influx of institutional money has supercharged the p2p lending sector, allowing Prosper and Lending Club and a host of newcomers to extend more loans to more borrowers. Lending Club figures that it has saved borrowers $250 million in interest charges. The two platforms say they have made more than $5 billion in loans to date and have been doubling in growth every year.
Medium, Susie Cagle
Susie recounts her experience at the Share conference and provides a comment about movement: “the benefits big disruptive sharing economy players might be making for themselves are not exactly trickling down (to workers and consumers, sole proprietors and nonprofit collectives who are often the ones facing real legal problems that they can’t afford to solve.”
Keep it real to catalyse the sharing economy
Denise Cheng, MIT Center for Civic Media
There are at least two major consequences for using the term “sharing economy” so liberally. One is on a policy/regulations level. The other is in how people and companies understand their commitment to one another.
The Sharing Economy Boom Is About to Bust
Joe Matthews, TIME
There are many benefits brought about by the sharing economy but there are also so many potential conflicts posed by it—professional, political, commercial, geographic, generational and gender lines.
Whose Privacy Will Uber Violate Next? Why Its Latest Bad Behavior Matters
Alexander Howard, Wired
Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published an explosive story, reporting on a dinner in New York City where Uber executive Emil Michael floated the idea of hiring opposition researchers to dig up dirt on journalists who had been critical of the startup.
Provider/Worker Rights in Collaborative Economy
In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty
Natasha Singer,New York Times
In a climate of high unemployment in the US, workers are turning to find one-off jobs in peer job marketplaces. This kind of piecemeal work has risks for workers: unstable work and wages because of fluctuating demand, and also company changes to terms with impunity.
Supply-Side Challenges Of The On-Demand Economy
Mike Dudas, TechCrunch
As the on-demand and sharing economy grows at a feverish pace, led by companies such as Uber, Airbnb, Postmates, Instacart and Homejoy, worker rights have become one of the focal points of the most prominent technology trends in recent history.
Collaborative Economy Companies Need To Start Sharing More Value With The People Who Make Them Valuable
Lisa Gansky, FastCompany
On the best-known peer to peer marketplaces, much of the value is being created by individuals both on the supply and the demand side. For example, Airbnb does not own any rooms. Their inventory is our homes, while Airbnb matches guests to hosts and provides services that make booking a home stay quick and painless. But when the founders of Airbnb raised capital from VCs, the expectation was that there would be a lot of wealth created for the people that built and run the platform. And there was zero expectation that any of the people who make the platform work—the hundreds of thousands of hosts across the world—would receive anything other than their share of the booking fees.
Trust
How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other
Jason Tanz, Wired
The sharing economy has come on so quickly and powerfully that regulators and economists are still grappling to understand its impact. But one consequence is already clear: many of these companies have us engaging in behaviors that would have seemed unthinkably foolhardy as recently as five years ago.
David Brooks, The New York Times
“The big thing I underestimated was the transformation of social trust. In primitive economies, people traded mostly with members of their village and community. Trust was face to face. Then, in the mass economy we’ve been used to, people bought from large and stable corporate brands, whose behavior was made more reliable by government regulation. But there is a new trust calculus, powered by both social and economic forces.”
Your most valuable digital asset? It might just be your integrity…
Jasmine Gardner, Evening Standard
The currency of the new economy is trust. People who share flats, clothes and cars between each other go through with transactions based on ‘trust profiles’ to assess if someone is reliable or not.
Companies are now vying for control of this aggregated ‘trust profile’ of people: Facebook profiles, Airbnb reviews etc.
Regulation
A Sharing Economy Cliffhanger: What Will Governments Do?
Wingham Rowan, Stanford Social Innovation Review
Peers, a group backed by companies including Airbnb and Taskrabbit began urging users to petition for changes in regulation. What is the government’s next move to regulate sharing economy companies: loosen rules or uphold them?
Trusting the ‘Sharing Economy’ to Regulate Itself
Arun Sundararajan, New York Times
Arun lists a variety of internet-enabled platforms for peer-to-peer commerce that are under regulatory battles such as Airbnb, Uber, RelayRides and more. He comments that “There’s a real danger that today’s misalignment between newer peer-to-peer business models and older regulations will impede economic growth. The solution is to delegate more regulatory responsibility to the marketplaces and platforms while preserving some government oversight, by creating new self-regulatory organizations like those that have succeeded in other markets and industries.”
James Surowiecki, The New Yorker
Ridesharing companies are actually piggybacking on the trust that consumers feel in what is typically a highly regulated economy of the taxi industry. If these companies become more established, they’ll have to reach some kind of accommodation with regulators, perhaps along the lines of rules that California’s Public Utilities Commission recently proposed, which would let the companies like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar operate if they implement certain safety and driver regulations.
Insurance
What Makes or Breaks Startups in the Sharing Economy? Insurance Rates
Jason Tanz, Wired
Insurance represents both the lifeblood and the biggest threat to the sharing economy. Companies like RelayRides — or Airbnb, Lyft, or any other sharing company — depend upon its customers’ willingness to trust one another. These businesses have devised numerous mechanisms to engineer that trust, but perhaps no one feature has been as important as insurance.
Market Opportunities
Sharing’s Not Just for Start-Ups
Rachel Botsman, Harvard Business Review
Marriott is just one example of an established company that’s starting to take a serious interest in the collaborative economy. Many observers associate the sector only with start-ups such as Airbnb (which lets people rent out unused rooms, apartments, or homes) and Uber (an on-demand car service). In fact the concept is being adopted by large companies and applied to intangible assets, not just cars and rooms.
Emergency Response
How the Sharing Economy Is Changing Disaster Response and Recovery
Justine Brown, Emergency Management
Governments are recognizing that sharing economy platforms can provide a vital link between needs and resources in times of emergency.
Why Ridesharing Is a Way Bigger Deal for Suburban Seniors Than Urban Millennials
Paul Supawanich, The Atlantic Cities
This at-your-fingertips, on-demand mobility experience is quickly becoming an expectation of our transportation system. But while the target beneficiaries of UberX, Lyft, Sidecar, and other transportation network companies have been young urban dwellers, these services could expand transportation options far more in the opposite market: seniors living in suburban and rural communities who are no longer able to drive.
Company Profiles
Airbnb Is Inc.’s 2014 Company of the Year
Burt Helm, INC
Airbnb has changed many people’s lives for the better, as entrepreneurs have long tried to do. What makes this company so noteworthy this year is that it has moved beyond building a disruptive business to battling entrenched interests.
Lyft-Off: Zimride’s Long Road To Overnight Success
Ryan Lawler, TechCrunch
When John Zimmer and Logan Green launched a new ride-sharing service called Lyft in the spring of 2012, they instantly knew they had a hit on their hands. But that wasn’t always the case.
