Books |
The Long Tail
Chris Anderson
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Non Fiction
I can hardly believe it — the editor of ‘Wired’ Magazine has written an entire book about HeadButler.com. Okay, he didn’t mention the name, but no matter. Anyone who knows what drives this site understands that HeadButler.com was a "Long Tail" idea a good many months before Chris Anderson first described the phenomenon in his ‘Wired’ cover story in the fall of 2004.
HeadButler.com and the “Long Tail” intersect this way: There’s no longer any reason to focus on the weekly culture glut of new books, movies and music churned out in massive quantities for mass-market consumption. Let the slick magazines do that if they must. (They don’t have to, but that’s another subject). The bottom line: Time just isn’t a factor here. Thanks to Amazon.com and BN.com and lots of other sites, the old stuff is as readily available as the new stuff. So HeadButler.com’s range is huge: every book ever published, every CD ever released, every movie ever slapped on a DVD.
Chris Anderson’s article about the Long Tail came as a revelation to readers eager for the next big idea. It was the most popular cover story in the magazine’s history. Publishers pounced; I think Anderson’s book advance was around $700,000. And now we have the book — an instant best seller, promoted as the next "Tipping Point" or "Blink."
Let us pass over the fact that there’s really not much more in the book than there was in the article. And that the charts and mathematical discourse are off-putting in the extreme to English majors like me. "The Long Tail" is a seriously large idea, and much more important than anything Malcolm Gladwell has written.
Anderson’s starting point is that our culture is "a massive popularity" contest where "hits rule." Or it was. The Internet changed all that. Now consumer choice has expanded geometrically, and, with more to buy, we buy more of everything. This is very good news for writers, musicians and filmmakers usually described as "niche."
If we think of cultural purchases pictorially — let’s say: as a snake — a sales chart will reveal a head held high. That’s for the "hits": the popular books, CDs and DVDs that millions buy as soon as they’re released. That line falls straight down — like a debutante’s neck — but just before the bottom it curves and heads straight for the horizon. That’s the Long Tail: the expression of consumer purchases of things that would never find shelf space in a superstore. And here’s the newsflash: That line never drops and hits zero. There’s demand all the way to the end of the tail. Or, to put it correctly, the tail never ends.
What this means: "Niches are riches." Or: Maybe the way to make decent money is not to chase mega-success but to focus on something small that you love, create a community around it, and make it easy for consumers to get what they want. (This is the relationship HeadButler.com has with you, and with Amazon.com.)
Some examples. "The Triplets of Belleville" — an animated French film of considerable brilliance — opened in just six theaters in the United States. Now that it’s a DVD on Amazon.com, anyone can see it. In Barnes & Noble superstores, the lowest ranked 1.2 million book titles represent just 1.7% of sales; online, those books are 10% of sales. Songs ranked below 10,000 on Rhapsody are streamed more than the top 10,000. And so on.
"The Long Tail is about abundance," Anderson writes. That is, it’s about endless consumer choice, endless consumer interest and your endless ability to buy what you want. I get the first two. I’m stuck on the third. I recently heard an oil executive suggest that it won’t be many years before oil is $150 a barrel. I fear I believed him. Well, in that scenario, if you’ve just paid $8-a-gallon for gas, I very much doubt you’re going to find it absolutely necessary to buy L’Atalante. Or maybe I should look on the bright side. Maybe the likely outcome of $8-a-gallon gas is that you’ll only want to consume culture that’s rich in protein. This would make ‘L’Atalante’ a better buy than the new J-Lo. And, not least, it would make “filters” like HeadButler.com more essential to your cultural consumption.
Another topic Anderson doesn’t really address: What are the political implications of the Long Tail? Sure, it breaks the monopoly of big media, but even more, it means you can sit on your couch forever. Consume better? I’m with you. Consume more? But then what exactly do you contribute to a world that desperately needs good ideas and hard work?
Maybe this is material for another book. Maybe the important thing is that Anderson identified a seismic shift in the marketplace. Lord knows we must all be sick of reading about the Internet as if it’s just the "blogosphere." And a book like this will surely set the entrepreneurial among you thinking of ideas for Internet businesses. Just don’t try to recreate HeadButler, or I’ll show you what the end of the Long Tail looks like.
To buy "The Long Tail" from Amazon.com, click here.
