Prosumers in 2009

Hanna Back, 21 de Maio, 2009.

UGC/Crowdsourcing/Wikiwork/Web 2.o  are concepts related with Prosumers. What is happening with them in 2009? what are they producing? what are they consuming? see this post on Prosumer in 2009.

For those who don’t know what is a prosumer, prosumer is: Producers+consumers=prosumers.

The term comes from Don Tapscott in his book Wikinomics (2006). Prosumers are basically people who have decided to be active on their consumption process.Whether if it is recommending, funding, co-creating, creating, reproducing, they are people increasingly participating in services,products and commercial idea process.
When we first heard the prosumer word, the main assumption was that mass media content would disappear once confronting the UGC (user generated content) and we must say that is NOT true.

Even in Youtube the most known UGC platform the most viewed list is clearly ruled by brand content. The second assumption it was that the prosumer label could be applied in all the Millenials generation, which reminded me the graph below.

Today in 2009 prosumers have evolved:

-Prosumers are also professionals developing their portafolio and work in the web, the perfect example Deviant art and CGsociety. So prosumer work is not synonimous of amateur.

-Prosumers are also microworkers, which means that most of them participate in one part of the project, product or service. How can that work? Crowdsourcing (Lots of people working at the same time=collective intelligence+quick response). There are great example as Quirky (crowd’s product creation on stages).

-Prosumers develop not only content but also filter content and display new insightful information which can be considered as a service, as for example: Recommendation/reviews on Amazon, useful links on Twitter (see @guykawasaki), Tumblr, Del.i.cious.

-The DIY trend (mentioned here before) make the prosuming more easy for newbies, and seems a profitable way to be a prosumer.

-The production tools used by prosumers can be infinite, but with the mass entrance to social media, most user have become Prosumers through applications, even if the results are limited by the tool, the results of test (What kind of tree you are?), web pet (Pet society) and other apps are definitly prosumer content.

Let’s tweet: @HannaIsBack-@Newronioespm

Hanna Back.