They say newlyweds have one year to send thank you notes out. In a rare moment or free time (or, to be honest, in a moment of playing hookey from my responsibilities), I finally got around to reading Chris Anderson’s seminal Long Tail essay, published last October. It’s an excellent analysis of how physical constraints have shaped the way in which media is marketed, and even more importantly how those shackles have been broken with the digital economy.
The long tail refers to the short part of the hockey stick curve where you have fewer and fewer sales of less popular items (it might be helpful to click through to Chris’s diagram). It’s thin but long, hence the “long tail”. To use books as an example, Chris says that large brick and mortar stores maybe stock 130,000 items. Anything less popular than that, doesn’t get stocked. Amazon, on the other hand, makes over half of it’s sales on items that are in the “long tail” — i.e. less popular than the 130,000. They might not sell many copies individually, but there are so many of them.
The huge benefit to the consumer of course is choice — freedom from the tyranny of an editor, or buyer, or market analyst deciding what you might like and stocking accordingly. This is a profound change for us as a species — moving us off of an oligarchy-driven mainstream, to a much wider dimension of interests. For both good (greater diversity and freedom to exercise focus) and bad (less shared experience), but in my opinion it nets out as a huge benefit to our race.
Chris has a long tail blog.
UPDATE: Funny coincidence, I wrote this piece not more than a half hour ago, and was just scanning my blogroll and saw that Tom posted about the long tail earlier today. That reminds me that I need to catch up on his installments of hackoff.com. I am really not getting work done now …