25 July 2018

The Timbro Sharing Economy Index is the first global index of the sharing economy. The index has been compiled using traffic volume data and scraped data, and provides a unique insight into the driving factors behind the peer-to-peer economy.

4,651 service candidates worldwide were considered, 286 of which were classified as sharing economy services. Monthly traffic data was collected for the services in 213 countries. 23 of the services also received a complete count of its active suppliers using automated “web scraping” techniques.

Previous cross-country studies we have seen have employed surveys or self-reported indicators. Given the many different colloquial notions of what the sharing economy is, these studies are inherently fuzzy about what they actually measure. To overcome this problem, we developed a definition of the sharing economy that allows for an exact classification of the services. The definition, thereby, enables us to know that the data we collected is concerned with a now well-defined concept, the sharing economy.

The largest company in our data set is Airbnb, with almost 1.5 million suppliers judged as active in an average week. Of the 286 companies classified as sharing economy services, one third supply housing and one half fall into the broad category of business services.

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