Wow.
Where to begin with this one.
Even though this book was released a few years ago, the concepts and contents of this book will probably be relevant for eternity, as long as there are means for abundant choice. I highly recommend everyone read this, particularly if you are in either business or technology, as it is relevant to both fields. (specifically: marketing / internet technology)
Essentially, “The Long Tail” refers to a powerlaw curve, where the vast majority of VOLUME is comprised of very few products, and the vast maority of PRODUCTS individually pull a very small number of sales. (The example used by the author is comparing books / CD’s offered by Wal-Mart, which sells only hits, versus the books / CDs sold by Amazon.com, which sells pretty much everything you can imagine). It’s a contrasting between “hits” and “niches”. In a situation where choice is abundant (such as on amazon) a Long-tail distribution will often emerge.
But the true strength of this book is the insight in both the case-studies and applications.
Anderson looks repeatedly to amazon.com, Rhapsody (the music service), social networking sites like Youtube.com or mySpace/Facebook, the iTunes store, and non-long-tail situations like the traditional music and film industry (the people currently trying to sue their way back into relevance), newspapers, and other media that have traditionally flourished in scarce “shelf space” scenarios.
In today’s society, Long Tails frequently emerge as the “tools of production are democratized,” or as “filters” become easier to access. People are discovering more and more options available, and are, with the assistance of filters and recommendation services (ie. Netflix, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc.) exploring alternatives and new products like never before.
One of my favorite quotes used in this book is regarding television, originally said by David Foster Wallace: “TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.” As someone that appreciates both South Park and the Marx Brothers, I can definitely relate. Anderson ties this into his opus through comparing those “vulgar and prurient and dumb” interests to the “hits” culture — which traditionally had to make the most efficient use of scarce shelf space to maximize sales for the store, the producer, and ultimately the content creator. But in a Long Tail culture, we can explore those refined and aesthetic interests individually, because on the Internet, shelf space is an infinite commodity.
As people are more easily able to produce music, movies, works of art and publish their writing without requiring a high barrier of entry (either economically or temporally), and as the means to seek out these productions becomes easier, it will become more apparent that the demand for this kind of niche content was always there, it was just suppressed by prior technological limitations. Hits will always be hits, but with better filters, those hits will merely serve as lowest-common-denominator entry points to drive people down the tail to other genres and micro-genres they never knew they liked (or existed!).
This book is a must-read. It’s not terribly long, but if you have any desire at all to “get” today’s culture and the society created by the Internet, this is the book to start with. (Music & Film Industry people, take note!)
