Study Reveals Big Opportunities in the Sharing Economy | Hacker News Reader

Study Reveals Big Opportunities in the Sharing Economy

life-connected.com

44 pointskrgaskins9 comments

Revenue streams are interesting to consider with these sharing focused start-ups. If the values of these users shift to "collaborative consumption", does that decrease or raise questions with advertising as a source of revenue (ethically or effectively)? It seems that a possible underlying value of these ideals is less (or anti) consumerism. Would these users be more open to a 'fee for service' model? (That would be refreshing.)

Side note: Profounder.com is another example of a social lending platform that does not require a fee.

If a user is looking for a resource that is not available via the community, the service can offer a commercial alternative.

I have built a first version of a service for sharing physical stuff (yet unreleased) and monetization seems like a no brainer.

From what I can tell there are two camps that are converging: 1) capitalists that want to monetize off the 3rd Economy and 2) resource-based social engineers using a YC-like network of startups to start an internal shared economy. They are both experimental in nature right now and the future of which one will succeed will be determined by how efficiently either one is run. I don't think there's middle ground in the long run.

How would anyone here feel about a crowdfunding platform that would allow people to fund local startups with objects/space/skills instead of money in return for their product(s)? This way no money gets wasted and the funded items are returned (except for the ramen of course) if the startup closes up shop.

Neighborgoods.net charges a fee to "verify" your existence as a real person (how's that for a CAPTCHA?). I like the idea and thought of it like they turned my whole area into a Costco. But I had to pay to get my membership card. On thing their founder has been talking about recently is how more than saving people money, it's having a dramatic effect on communities that embrace it. The idea of sharing might be more powerful than the sharing itself.

I like the knowledge sharing example - what about an "exclusive" knowledge sharing forum between certain professionals - say in house lawyers? I know in the time I was a general counsel there were a lot of questions I didn't have the answer to at my fingertips and would have loved a group of similarly qualified professionals to bounce questions and answers off of. Instead I always ended up researching it myself from scratch.

I notice in the infographic that physical media has the highest latent demand.

Yes, but the sample size of people who don't share physical media (in an organized way) is also relatively smaller than other categories (thus, high market saturation).

Also, for the purposes of mapping opportunity, latent demand was described as both 1) those who share casually (not through a service or organized community) and 2) those who don't currently share at all but would be interested to. In the case of physical media, I suspect there's more people under #1 than #2.

An interesting look at how community creates economy.

Looks interesting.

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