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TheLongTail

Page history last edited by Nicolas Cynober 16 years, 7 months ago

The Long Tail

Date: 2006 (First article in Wired magazine: October 2004)

Author: Chris Anderson

p2:


Most of the top fifty best-selling albums of all time were recorded in the seventies and eighties (the Eagles, Michael Jackson), and none of them were made in the past five years. Hollywood box-office revenue was down by more than 6 percent in 2005, reflecting the reality that the theatergoing audience is falling even as the population grows.

Every year network TV loses more of its audience to hundreds of niche cable channels. Males age eighteen to thirty-four, the most desirable audience for advertisers, are starting to turn off the TV altogether, shifting more and more of their screen time to the Internet and video games. The ratings of top TV shows have been falling for decades, and the number one show today wouldn’t have made the top ten in 1970.


 

p5:


The mass market is turning into a mass of niches.


 

 

p16:


People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further 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 lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).


 

p40:


Instead of the office watercooler, which crosses cultural boundaries as only the random assortment of personalities found in the workplace can, we're increasingly forming our own tribes, groups bound together more by affinity and shared interests than by default broadcast schedules.  These days our watercoolers are increasingly virtual-there are many different ones, and the people who gather around them are self-selected.  We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interest.


Niches are still separated by geography, you just have to look how many services on the web are cloned to match to a specific country.

 

p54:



 

p63:


The consequence of all this is that we’re starting to shift from being passive consumers to active producers. And we’re doing it for the love of it (the word “amateur,” derives from the Latin amator, “lover” from amare, “to love”).


 

p117:


This leads to the key to what's different about Long Tails. They're not pre-filtered by the requirements of distribution bottlenecks and all that entails (editors, studio execs, A&R guys and Wal-Mart purchasing managers). As a result their components vary wildly in quality, just like everything else in the world.

One way to describe this (using the same language of information theory that brought us signal-to-noise ratios) would be to say that Long Tails have a "wide dynamic range" of quality: awful to great. By contrast, the average store shelf has a relatively narrow dynamic range of quality: mostly average to good (there's some really great stuff, but much of that is too expensive for the average retail shelf; niches exist at both ends of the quality spectrum).


 

p119:


If you've got help - smart search engines, recommendations, or other filters - tour odds of finding something just right  for you are actually greater in the Tail. Best-sellers tend to appeal, at least superficially, to a broad range of taste. Niche products are meant to appeal strongly to a narrow set of tastes. That's why the filter technologies are so important. They not only drive demand down the Tail, but they also increase satisfaction by connecting people with products that are more right for them than the broad-appeal products ar the Head.


 

p138:


Need markets are those in which customers know what they're looking for and just can't find it anywhere but, say, online.


 

p139:


One of the features of powerlaws is that they are "fractal", which is to say that no matter how far you zoom in they still look like powerlaws. Mathematocians describe this as "self-similarity at multiple scales" but what it means is that the Long Tail is made of many mini-tails, each of which is its own little world.


 

p167:


These are some of the other mental traps we fall into because of scarcity thinking:

  • Everyone wants to be a star
  • Everyone's in it for the money
  • If it isn't a hit, it's a miss
  • The only success is mass success
  • "Direct to video" = bad
  • "Self-published" = bad
  • "Independent" = "they couldn't get a deal"
  • Amateur = amateurish
  • Low-selling = low quality
  • If it were good, it would be popular

 

p169:


As levels of affluence rose markedly in the 1970s and 1980s, status was redefined. We've had a change from "I want to be normal" to "I want to be special". As companies competed to indulge this yearning, they began to elaborate mass production into mass customization.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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