Chris Anderson – “The Long Tail”

Chris Anderson – The Long Tail

Reaching Millions
The great thing about broadcast is that it can bring one show to millions of people with unmatchable efficiency. But it can’t do the opposite–bring a million shows to one person each. Yet that is exactly what the Internet does so well. (Anderson, p. 5)

One Size Doesn’t Fit AllThe era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes. (Anderson, p. 5)

What Consumers Want
Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service–from DVDs at the rental-by-mail firm Netflix to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available at Blockbuster Video and Tower Records. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander farther from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a hit-centric culture, and simply a lack of alternatives). (Anderson, p. 16)

Hits And Niches
For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability. (Anderson, p. 24)

The Nature Of Markets
When you can dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. (Anderson, p. 26)

Seek And Ye Shall Find
Today, not only have listeners stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to make them throng those stores on release day. Given the option to pick a boy band or find something new, more and more people are opting for exploration, and are typically more satisfied with what they find. (Anderson, p. 33)

What Watercooler Effect?
The watercooler effect is losing its power. Today, the top-ranked TV show, CSI, is watched by just 15 percent of TV households. Those kinds of numbers wouldn’t have put it in the top ten in the seventies. (Anderson, p. 37)

TV For All
The arrival of TiVo and other DVRs amplified this dissolution of the watercooler effect by removing the time component as well. Today, even if people are watching the same shows, they may not be watching them on the same night at the same time. Who wants to listen to the morning-after recaps of real-timers, people who will ruin the surprise of shows you’ve yet to watch? (Anderson, p. 38)

Economics Of Shelves
What the Internet presented was a way to eliminate most of the physical barriers to unlimited selection. The bricks-and-mortar superstores had scale, but they still had to deal with the economics of shelves, walls, staff, locations, working hours, and weather. (Anderson, p. 49)

Bottlenecks Of Distribution
In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. (Anderson, p. 52)

Everyone Is A Distributor
The fact that anyone can make content is only meaningful if others can enjoy it. The PC made everyone a producer or publisher, but it was the Internet that made everyone a distributor. (Anderson, p. 55)

We’re Active Consumers
We’re starting to shift from being passive consumers to active producers. And we’re doing it for the love of it. (Anderson, p. 63)

It Could Be You
It’s one thing to see a movie or listen to music and to think “genius”–that some gifted person and exalted apparatus has put together this unique work of art we appreciate. However, once you know what’s behind the curtain, you begin to realize that it could be you. (Anderson, p. 64)

Content In The Long Tail
It is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail–it is, by definition, variable and diverse. (Anderson, p. 69)

Tools Of Production
We are at the dawn of an age where most producers in any domain are unpaid, and the main difference between them and their professional counterparts is simply the (shrinking) gap in the resources available to them to extend the ambition of their work. When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer. (Anderson, p.73)

Democratized Distribution
Just think about how many people can produce quirkier fare, content that can resonate with an audience that has grown up online–the place where niches, not networks, rule. Think about how many of those potential talents now have a chance to find a real audience, thanks to the democratized distribution of the Internet. (Anderson, p. 81)

Entries In A Database
A best-seller and a never-seller are just two entries in a database; equal in the eyes of technology and the economics of storage. (Anderson, p. 96-97)

Infinite Selection Of Media
Although there may be near infinite selection of all media, there is still a scarcity of human attention and hours in the day. Our disposable income is limited. On some level, it’s still a fixed-price game. Offer a couch potato a million TV shows and he or she may end up watching no more television than before, just different television, better suited to that individual. (Anderson, p. 146)

Virtues Of Findability
The Google era has opened our eyes to the lucrative virtues of findability. We type in what we want (misspelled or not) and, more often than not, it pops right up. We are now spoiled with useful recommendations (lessons learned by those who came before us) that introduce us to things we never would have thought of or found on our own. (Anderson, p. 153)

Where Things Go To Die
“Shelf life” refers to mortality of expiring goods–whether literal (think: bananas just starting to brown) or figurative (think: Halloween-themed paper plates in March). In the realm of film and television, “shelved” means canceled or delayed. Shelves are places where things go to die. (Anderson, p. 159)

Explosion Of Variety
We are in the midst of the biggest explosion of variety in history. (Anderson, p. 168)

Generic To Specific
This shift from the generic to the specific doesn’t mean the end of the existing power structure or a wholesale shift to an all-amateur, laptop culture. Instead, it’s simply a rebalancing of the equation, an evolution from an “Or” era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. sub-cultures) to an “And” era. Today, our culture is increasingly a mix of head and tail, hits and niches, institutions and individuals, professionals and amateurs. Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass. And niche culture will get less obscure. (Anderson, p. 181-182)

Entering The Mico-Culture Era
In other words, we’re leaving the watercooler era, when most of us listened, and read from the same, relatively small pool of mostly hit content. And we’re entering the micro-culture era, when we’re all into different things. (Anderson, p. 184-185)

The Newspaper of Television
I suspect that the thirty-minute show is the newspaper of television–a format born of distribution scarcity that is now past its prime. Demand will shift to shorter content for convienience and entertainment, and longer content for substance and satisfaction. But the arbitrary middle will not hold. (Anderson, p. 199)

Is It The End Of Hits?
By far the most common misperception is that the Long Tail predicts the end of hits. Not so. Hits are as much a part of a powerlaw distribution as are niches. What’s dead is the monopoly of the hit. For too long hits or products intended to be hits have had the stage to themselves, because only hit-centric companies had access to the retail channel and the retail channel only had room for best-sellers. But now blockbusters must share the stage with a million niche products, and this will lead to a very different marketplace. (Anderson, p. 230)

Bibliography

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More of Less. Hyperion, 2006.