When we look back at the evolution of the web, one shift stands out as foundational: the transition from Web 1.0, a static, read-only environment, to Web 2.0, where users became active participants in creating, shaping, and sharing content.
This is a topic I teach in my introductory courses on the digital revolution, because understanding this shift is essential to understanding the landscape marketers navigate today.
One of the core concepts I cover is what media scholar Axel Bruns coined Produsage. The framework (introduced in 2007, updated in 2011 and 2025) describes what happens when the boundaries between production and usage dissolve.
Although it emerged in early Web 2.0, its underlying logic is still at work in approaches like community-led growth and co-creation, where brands build relationships by treating audiences as participants rather than recipients.
If you want to learn more about the core concepts I cover in my introductory class, in particular the 5 pillars that shape the digital revolution check ou this article: The Digital Revolution: Understanding the 5 Pillars Reshaping Business and Society
What is Produsage?
The term is a deliberate contraction of production and usage. Bruns argued that in Web 2.0 environments, the traditional boundary between producer and consumer has dissolved. What emerged in its place is a hybrid figure, the Produser, someone who simultaneously creates and consumes content.
According to Bruns (2011), produsage is characterised by four defining pillars:
- Open participation and communal evaluation: Content is generated by a wide, diverse, and voluntary community rather than a closed team.
- Fluid heterarchy and ad hoc meritocracy: Leadership is not fixed; status is earned through the quality of one's contributions.
- Unfinished artefacts and continuing process: Outcomes are always in progress, continually edited and reworked rather than released as final versions.
- Common property and individual rewards: Participants treat their work as a common resource, seeking recognition rather than direct financial compensation.
What makes this framework relevant for marketers is the underlying shift it describes: from a focus on the product itself to a focus on what happens around the product.
In a traditional model, value is embedded in the finished good. The company creates it, the customer receives it. In produsage, value emerges from what people do with and around the product: the content they create, the conversations they start, the knowledge they share. The product is no longer the endpoint. It is the starting point of a collaborative process.
It is worth noting that Bruns uses the word "artefact" differently from how marketers typically understand it. In his framework, the artefact is not the product or service itself, but the shared content and knowledge that a community creates around it.
How the Concept Has Evolved (and Been Challenged)
Produsage did not emerge in a vacuum, and it has not gone unchallenged.
One common point of confusion is the relationship between produsage and the earlier concept of the Prosumer, coined by Alvin Toffler in the 1970s. Toffler's Prosumer is essentially an involved consumer who customises a producer's goods (product centric). Bruns argues that produsage goes further: it describes voluntary, non-commercial collaboration within a community, where the output is treated as a common good rather than the firm's property (product adjacent).
The Paradox of "Playbour"
One of the most important critiques concerns what scholars call Playbour (a contraction of play and labour). The argument is straightforward: when users create content on commercial platforms, they perform unpaid work that the platform monetises. The produser is empowered to create (information commons), but simultaneously contributes monetisable value to the platform owner. This creates a tension between shared value and value extraction that marketers need to take seriously.
Platform Architecture and Visibility Inequality
This tension deepens when we consider the platforms on which produsage takes place. Recent research from the University of Amsterdam by Larooij and Törnberg (2025) shows, using generative social simulation, that even a minimal platform architecture without recommendation algorithms tends to produce extreme visibility inequality. In their simulations, roughly 75–80% of all followers are concentrated among the top 10% of users, and 10% of posts receive 90% of all reposts. In practice, this suggests that platform structures can concentrate influence in ways that reproduce the very hierarchies produsage was meant to dissolve.
From Theory to Practice: The Community Flywheel
The core logic of produsage remains visible in how companies nurture communities today. To understand how, it helps to trace the evolution of relationship models in marketing.
The AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action), dating back over a century, depicts a linear progression that ends at the purchase. The customer decision journey (McKinsey, 2015) extends the relationship into post-purchase stages: enjoy, advocate, and bond. It recognises that the sale is the beginning, not the end.
The Community-Led Growth (CLG) Flywheel takes this further. Where the customer journey highlights stages after the purchase, the flywheel makes post-purchase engagement the engine of growth itself. Delighted customers become advocates, who attract new customers, who in turn become advocates. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle rather than a linear path.
What makes the flywheel particularly interesting is that its success factors mirror Bruns' four pillars. Community members participate voluntarily and evaluate each other's contributions. Influence shifts based on who contributes value, not on formal hierarchy. And the brand itself, its content, reputation, and community knowledge, is never "finished." It is continuously shaped by the people who use and advocate for it.
The Notion Case Study
Notion, a productivity platform valued at around $10 billion, illustrates produsage logic in action. Its growth relies less on paid acquisition than on treating the product as a collaborative artefact shaped by its community.
Templates as unfinished artefacts. Users began sharing their own setups on Reddit, Twitter, and personal blogs. Notion then created an official Template Gallery hosting community-made solutions alongside its own. These templates are never "finished": they are copied, adapted, and improved by others, turning the product into a living resource.
Community leadership through contribution. Notion's Ambassador and Champion programs reflect fluid heterarchy. Ambassadors (external creators) and Champions (internal advocates) earn their roles through demonstrated contribution and enthusiasm, not formal hierarchy.
Listening at scale. Notion systematically observes how its community uses the product across forums, social media, and direct conversations, feeding insights into product decisions. This blurs the line between "user feedback" and "product development," turning co-creation into a continuous process.
Looking Ahead: AI and the Evolving Produser
As generative AI tools automate more production work, the produser's contribution shifts. Research by Microsoft (Lee et al., 2025) shows that greater reliance on AI is associated with reduced self-reported critical thinking effort, suggesting that the human contribution is moving toward curation, verification, and editing rather than raw output.
Some researchers are exploring what this looks like at scale. Building on Bruns' metaphor of the "hive", Dzreke and Dzreke (2026) propose a "Digital Hive Mind" framework in which AI systems synchronise decentralised consumer input in real time, pushing produsage toward continuous co-creation. Whether this model proves durable remains to be seen, but the direction it points toward, AI as an accelerator of collective intelligence rather than a replacement, is worth watching.
What This Means in Practice
Three areas are worth focusing on for marketers looking to work with produsage logic rather than around it.
1. Rethink the role of content
In a produsage framework, content is not a finished deliverable but a starting point designed to be shared, adapted, and built upon. The concrete form depends on what you sell:
- A software company might offer editable templates or workflows;
- a physical-product brand might host a community gallery where customers share setups, hacks, or routines (think LEGO Ideas or GoPro's user footage);
- a services firm might run an open Q&A forum or office hours where client answers become a reusable knowledge base.
The common thread is creating materials and spaces that invite customers to add their own examples and improvements, rather than treating every asset as a polished one-way broadcast. Not every business will be able to build this kind of participatory layer at scale, and the point of marketing is not to do everything, but to find one or two formats that fit your offer and execute them well.
2. Recognise and empower contributors
Bruns' key insight is that produsage communities run on recognition and status rather than direct compensation. For marketers, this means visibility (roles, titles, early access, advisory positions) often sustains engagement more effectively than discounts. Notion's Ambassador and Champion programs illustrate how formalising signals of status can energise a community.
3. Complement acquisition with the flywheel
The CLG Flywheel does not replace customer acquisition; structured acquisition programs still matter. What the flywheel does is amplify them: when existing customers advocate for your brand, they pre-create trust and lower the cost of reaching new prospects. Recent community reports suggest that brands with active communities often see higher engagement, retention, and customer lifetime value.
Conclusion
Produsage is not a new concept, but its core logic (open participation, fluid leadership, unfinished artefacts, shared ownership) is deeply embedded in how marketing works in today's community-driven landscape. Bruns' framework still offers a useful lens for understanding how value is created when brands nurture communities rather than treating audiences as passive receivers.
What is new is the role of AI in this ecosystem. As generative tools automate more production, the produser's contribution shifts toward curation, verification, and critical oversight. For marketers, the challenge is designing strategies in which communities remain genuinely empowered participants, rather than unpaid extensions of an AI-driven content machine.
What is your perspective?
- Do you see customers creating content around your product or service? If so, how are you supporting that behaviour?
- Where do you see the line between genuine co-creation and "playbour" in your industry?
If you find this kind of research-backed analysis useful, subscribe to my newsletter where I translate academic marketing research into practical frameworks you can apply right away.
Sources
- Bruns, A. (2007) ‘Produsage: Towards a broader framework for user-led content creation’, in Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition. Washington, DC: ACM, pp. 99–106.
- Bruns, A. and Schmidt, J.-H. (2011) ‘Produsage: A closer look at continuous collaborative content creation’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 16(1), pp. 1–9.
- Dzreke, M. and Dzreke, S. (2026) ‘Tapping the digital hive mind: A framework for real-time co-creation and value optimization with the collective consumer’, Global Journal of Engineering and Technology Advances, 26(1), pp. 1–12. doi: 10.30574/gjeta.2026.26.1.0016.
- Edelman, D.C. and Singer, M. (2015) ‘Competing on customer journeys’, Harvard Business Review, 93(11), pp. 88–100.
- Fuchs, C. (2014) Digital labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.
- Larooij, M. and Törnberg, P. (2025) Can we fix social media? Testing prosocial interventions using generative social simulation. University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385 (Accessed: 9 March 2026).
- Microsoft Research (2025) ‘The impact of generative AI on critical thinking’. Microsoft Research. Available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-critical-thinking/ (Accessed: 9 March 2026).
- Toffler, A. (1980) The third wave. New York: William Morrow.
