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Long Tail comment elsewhere...

  • Jakob Nielsen on microstars and fractal tails
    An oldie, but a goodie. Back in 2003, Jakob Nielsen was noticing the importance of microstars and minihits. In this post he observes that a niche site might not rank high in the overall Web popularity stakes, "but within their niche they dominate. A site that ranks as number 100,000 in the overall Web universe would still be the fifth largest within its niche: big enough to throw some weight around. Furthermore, niches have their own niches. Focusing on a highly targeted subtopic can make even a tiny site with a few hundred thousand page views stand out." Excellent point, but while I'm on the subject of Jakob, why is it that this supersmart guy and famed useability expert has one the worst-looking sites on the net? Please, Jakob, it's 2005--redesign!
  • Fragmenting Hollywood
    From a piece (reg req'd) in today's NYT business section on why Warner Brothers Entertainment, which is the best-performing of the studios, is laying off employees and building up a digital arm in anticipation of tougher days ahead: "The business is made much more complex by windows and audiences that are fragmenting," CEO Barry Meyer said. "The story for the next 10 years is how content is going to adapt. You won't find your audience in any one place anymore."
  • Extending the book tail, one page at a time
    Yellowhandman rightly notes that the efforts of Google and Amazon to sell book content by the chapter and even page will likely extend the tail of the demand curve. "Allow people to buy stuff the way they want to, so that you can wring every last cent out of your content, by earning $1 from someone who isn't willing to spend $10 for the entire book. Perhaps someone will shortly suggest a subscription model for online books : sign up for a membership plan and get to read as many books as you want (or a specified monthly quota) on your computer, but without being able to download or print the books. Probably too easily hackable, but much more appealing to me, because it means having a potentially huge number of books available for actual reading on your desktop, without even having to trudge down to the library."
  • A second look at the "first Long Tail IPO"
    I called the Digital Music Group's S1 filing the "first Long Tail IPO" in this post. Now people are looking at it more closely and finding some worrying aspects. At the Street.com Kevin Kelleher (disclosure: he writes for Wired, too) notes this: "The executives at DMG still seem to be in the process of choosing a business model. Last year, the company said it planned to beef up hiring so it could sign, promote and market undiscovered artists. In May, it abruptly shifted gears, laying off seven of its 15 workers, and decided to focus on buying the rights of golden oldies. Also in the second quarter, the company took a $75,000 writedown for a non-recoverable advance it made to an unnamed recording artist."
  • Peer production = "punk publishing"
    Piers Fawkes makes the inevitable comparison between today's democratization of the tools of production and yesterday's: "In 1976 punk broke onto the music scene and changed the rules of music. Music was democratized - you didn't even need to be able to sing or know how to play music--you just needed a guitar. Now blogging is having the same impact on publishing. Of course, a lot of rubbish gets produced but some great gems get created too that wouldn't have normally been produced under the old system. This is the era of punk publishing! Look around the blogosphere - can you spot the Sex Pistols? Or the Clash? Can you see a great entrepreneur like the one we got from that era: Richard Branson?"
  • The LT of Wikipedia
    Wikipedia is yet another powerlaw: a small number of contributors account for most of the edits, while a large number have just a few each. But don't confuse edits with entries. The ocassional contributors tend to write most of the zillions of more obscure articles, which is part of what makes Wikipedia unique. Are those articles better or worse than the heavily-edited ones at the head? David Weinberg elicits some useful comments, including this one: "The [obscure articles] edited by a few authors that know about the subject are honestly some of the best in wikipedia I think, as long as they are not about anything controversial. Usually they aren't though, or they would have more editors."
  • Satellite Radio = the LT of classical music
    James DeLong has fallen in love with satellite radio, which is driving his CD demand down Amazon's tail. The news for me: MP3 players don't display classical metadata right. There's an opportunity there... Excerpt: "I am wallowing in composers and works that I had never heard of: Svendsen, Vieuxtemps, Pitfield, Grieg (other than the great Piano Concerto). And Amazon is now awash in CD orders; I would not buy Mozart, usually, since I am sure of hearing lots of that, but lesser-known works of Gerald Finzi? They may never cross my path. (Downloading is not a good option for classical; no player that I know of can handle the information, and I spent several hundred $ to learn this.)"
  • Nintendo's Long Tail strategy?
    If you're interested in the dynamics of the game industry, Lost Garden has an interesting perspective on Nintendo's place in it. Stuck in third place, it has survived with a strategy of gameplay innovation and low-cost economics. Here's a factoid I didn't know: "The Xbox, which focuses on highly mature genres catering to hardcore gamers has production costs of $1.82 million a title. The Gamecube costs half as much at $822,000 a title. The real kicker is that the Nintendo DS only costs $338, 286 a title to develop for, even less than the Gameboy. Some of these costs have to do with the hardware and development kits, but for the most part they are derived from the scope of the projects. Being able to develop successful titles at 1/5th the cost of your competitors is a major boost to your bottom line."
  • Google book search favors the little guy
    Max Kalehoff considers the impact of Google's book scanning project on publishers, and predicts a tectonic power shift (free reg req'd): "A great analogy to describe the potential impact of the long tail in book search is to consider the rapid rise of consumer-created content online--including blogs, message boards, ratings sites and other forms of social media. These platforms are becoming incredibly influential, not just because of their sheer popularity, and compelling content, but because they represent a massively growing share of online content relative to all other--such as corporate, commercial, editorial and government content. These more niche social media tend to place very prominently in search engines, and therefore can achieve otherwise disproportionate exposure. Anyone responsible for the reputation of a big corporate brand is often kept up at night by that fact--the little guy's voice is being heard like never before, loud and clear."
  • Powerlaws as an indicator of website useability
    An interesting application of Zipf's Law to measure how well a website is designed. Slicecast plots the popularity of pages within a site on a log-log scale. Well-designed sites show a graceful powerlaw decline in rank. But in poorly-designed sites page rank drops off much more quickly, as visitors get frustrated and leave.
  • A fourth Long Tail force?
    NextSmallThings suggests a new Long Tail force to go with the three I've described-- 1) Democratizing the tools of production (e.g. the PC) 2) Lowering the transaction costs of consumption (e.g. the Internet) 3) Connecting consumers to drive demand to niches (e.g. Google): "I’d like to suggest that there’s a 4th ascendant force: 4) Increasing opportunities to reuse content/product/service in new and more convenient contexts." My own take: that's part of Force 1.
  • Blog archives as a Long Tail over time
    Raj Kumar Dash has a smart observation on the value of leaving your blog archives open, gradually accumulating search-driven advertising in a Long Tail of readership over time: "If your posts have contextual advertising, just because they don't earn any ad revenue right away does not mean that they will not give you a healthy return over several years. Make regular but relevant references to your older posts to help the long tail phenomenon on its way."
  • The forces democratizing moviemaking
    The makers of an "open source movie about blogs and bloggers" describe the factors that are making Long Tail moviemaking possible: "a) new low-cost hardware and software; b) cost-effective services providing next to unlimited hosting space and bandwidth costs for independent producers. c) new ways, modes and devices to access, store, retrieve and play back video content on personal, home and portable media devices; d) online content clearinghouses, search engines and human ratings and recommendations; e) P2P distribution technologies; f) powerful technology-based innovations slashing marketing and distribution costs."
  • The Purse Blog
    For those who make the mistake of thinking that niches are a cultural subclass, consider the $1,200 handbag and the women who love them: "You don’t need an Oxbridge degree, a million-dollar trust fund or a Nobel Peace Prize to earn the respect of women these days. Just head out to the shops and buy yourself a designer bag. Better yet, make it the It bag of the season." How do you know what the It bag of the season is? By reading the Purse Blog, of course.
  • The Onion as Long Tail ad network
    Kevin Burton notices that the ads in the free copy of The Onion he picked up in SF are not just for local businesses, but hyperlocal ones: "For example, I was at a popular geek hangout iin my neighborhood named Crepes on Cole and noticed that The Onion had an ad for Magnolia (a beer pub). They're just 5 blocks away from where I was having my coffee. Brilliant!" Is The Onion really mass customizing its product, or is this just a coincidence?
  • The virtues of a permanent work-in-progress
    Nellie Lide connects the dots on the air-your-unfinished-laundry phenomena (including this blog): "One notion in particular might help mainstream companies--the meme about `The perpetual beta.' We're so used to not releasing a product, a service, an idea, until it's fully baked. But with the Web 2.0, you have permission to play around with things, to work on them as people are watching, with the help of people."
  • Why a 200-year-old statistics book is racing up the charts on Amazon
    Robin Good tells the story of how the attentions of infographics guru Edward Tufte got a statistics atlas from 1796 republished--and why it's now at 5,000 (and rising) on Amazon. The author of the original book, William Playfair, "made little impression in his native land, and his impact was only slightly greater in England and France. Yet he is responsible for inventions familiar and useful to us all: he was the first to devise and publish all of the common statistical graphs - the pie chart, the bar chart, and the statistical line graph."
  • The Long Tail of programming languages
    Charles Simonyi's (ex Microsoft executive) and his team at Intentional Software collect some data on the Long Tail of programming languages and then consider the implications. "Why is there such a long tail of programming languages in the community? And is there an efficient way to satisfy the obvious need for more niche languages and promote the language innovation that happens in the long tail? The first question is pretty easy to answer. There is a long tail because the more specialized a language is to a domain, the better it fits to solve problems for that domain. These niche languages trade off generality for efficiency in a domain and they are simply better and more efficient tools for that domain. The second question is a bit harder..." Follow the link for more; it's worth it.
  • Jonathan Schwartz on open standards and the LT of citizenry
    Sun Microsystem's president blogs about how open Internet standards can help connect the Long Tail of the population: "Bridging the Digital Divide is all about serving the longest tail - by driving down price, and driving up access and interoperability. What is happening in Massachusetts is the beginning of a global realization that governments have a productive obligation to serve the longest tail - their citizenry. By deploying open, accessible standards - not the technology of a single company."
  • Cover songs and other coattailing as a LT marketing strategy
    Nick Carr notes an emergent Long Tail strategy of coattailing. Obscure bands, for instance, get free marketing by recording cover version of famous songs, which show up in iTunes searchs for the hit. "This sort of practice - let's call it "head-faking" (or maybe "head-phaking" would be hipper) - has broad applications as a sales strategy for long-tail markets. You simply give your product (whether it's a song, a book, a DVD, a software program, or whatever) some tie-in to a hit product. You might, say, incorporate the hit's title into your own product's title. Through the magic of search technology, your product then becomes a barnacle that the hit carries along with it as it cruises through the limelight."
  • Hacking the Long Tail of Google Adwords
    How search engine optimizers (SEOs) automatically create thousands of fake sites designed to rank highly in search on obscure keywords: "Just one of a Search Engine Spammer’s spam sites could have 30,000 pages. This site might receives just one unique visitor on less than 10% of the pages per day. Of those 3,000 visitors if only 2% (60) click on a 10 cent Adsense word, this site would generate $6.00 per day or $180 per month. So does the smart search engine spammer stop at 1 or 5 site? Of course not. A true SEO Black Hat has hundreds (and in many cases thousands) of these sites operating at once. "
  • The "Airport Effect" in book publishing
    An interesting history of how a drive for effeciency in the mid-90s made the book industry as hit-driven ("short head") as Hollywood: "A key result of the shift in distribution patterns was the streamlining of the way retailers ordered books from publishers. Why pick and choose among thousands of titles that might sell only a handful of copies? Wasn’t it better to follow the formula that worked so well at airports, ordering only the top fifteen or twenty bestselling books by branded authors like Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum, John Grisham and Stephen King? As paperback publishers awoke to the new buying patterns, they were forced to choose between star authors and those whose sales performance fell below a minimum level. At first the triaging was restricted to marginal genres like westerns, but as the last decade of the twentieth century progressed the definition of “marginal” broadened to embrace every category of book that fell below an ever-stricter definition of commerciality."
  • The LT of Internet Traffic
    For those who are really into the nuts and bolts of Long Tailed distributions, an invitation from Art Zaifman: "I'm working on an R&D; project at AT&T; Labs that employs an in-house sampling algorithm that has been proven optimal in its ability to reduce yet retain accuracy of data that follows a heavy/long tailed distribution. We're currently using this algorithm in a product that measures IP (internet protocol) traffic volumes (which happen to follow the LT-distribution) in enormous networks. I'm very interested in applying this technology to other LT-distributions that can potentially benefit (i.e., environments that produce LT-distribution data in large volumes)." You can reach him at zaifman [at] research.att.com
  • Podcast-friendly music
    IODA, who famously have the "obligatory Long Tail slide" as part of their investor presentation, have released a library of music with pre-cleared rights for podcasts, blogging, Internet radio and the like. From the press release: "In exchange for access to the thousands of PromoTracks available in the system, qualified podcasters and bloggers must comply with a few simple rules designed to raise awareness of the artists and labels and drive sales of their music. PromoTracks must be properly identified and the sites using them in their programming must include links to the artists’ sites as well as “buy” links to at least one digital and one physical retail site for each release. IODA will provide all necessary information and assets via the Promonet site. "
  • The LT Blog...in Japanese!
    I was delighted to discover that Takashi Oguma has been translating this blog into Japanese (thanks to the Creative Commons license). He has a question about the role of language in the LT: "Japanese has a tradition of being insular--most of us don't have tendency to be passionate to niche foreign culture mostly because of language barrier. I think the language bottleneck is huge to us and thus being a counter force against driving someone to a Long Tail content . For instance, only a few people read your blog while discussing about The Long Tail in Japan. I suspect that we have "translation culture" and thus, even more hit driven for English contents. This applies to mainstream media such as books, films and games. I'd be happy to hear some discussions about bottlenecks of languages towards driving demand down the tail." You can email him at takashi.oguma@gmail.com
  • "How RSS thickened my LT"
    Alex Barnett does some analysis on his blog traffic and discovers that the RSS feed flattens the curve. Because the feed "pushes" all the posts to readers, more of them get read. So there's less inequity between the popular and unpopular ones. Also: "at least 80% of the traffic I get to posts after 3 months are via the search engines that match niche content with niche interests - the Filters of the web. The rest of the traffic comes after 3 months, from referrers from other blogs and online resources (articles, guides, lists of useful links on a subject, etc.)"
  • The connections between the LT and Web 2.0
    Joshua Porter explains the connections between the LT and Web 2.0, the umbrella meme of open technologies and empowered consumers: "I see lots of similarities between the Long Tail and Web 2.0. Both ideas are about improved access to previously unavailable content, both are about showing the whole catalog, and both are ultimately great at enabling user choice. They seem to overlap a lot. If I had to make a marked distinction between them I would say that Web 2.0 is about the access to information while the Long Tail is about the economics of it all.
  • The Future of Entertainment
    A huge package in The Holywood Reporter about how technology is changing the entertainment industry. Interviews with a score of luminaries, from George Lucas and James Cameron to Syd Mead and Judith Regan (and Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, who discusses the LT). Nothing hugely surprising, but worth dipping into to see how the Hollywood establishment views disruptive technologies.
  • "Ambient Findability"
    A new O'Reilly book by Peter Morville, author of the seminal Information Architecture for the Web. It seems relevent to my work on filters and quotes liberally from the LT. No idea what he means by "ambient", however. Chapter one is free for online reading. From the description: "How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age? This he book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability. "
  • Churchill Club speech
    A nice edit of a speech I gave at the Churchill Club a couple months ago. It was my first without Powerpoint, which was a little disorienting--I ended up drawing tails on the wall with my finger. But the feedback was that some people preferred it in words alone, and it certainly makes for a better transcript. Part 1: The origins of Long Tail. Part 2. A book tale: Writing the Long Tail story in public. Part 3. Tyranny of choice? Doesn't exist on the Long Tail. Part 4. Amplified word of mouth on the Long Tail. Part 5. The long reach of the Long Tail.
  • The LT of Linux kernel developers
    Greg Borenstein describes a Long Tail of people, in this case open source programmers: "New communication technologies and the lowered cost of participation they created allowed the Linux movement to effectively harness a large and diverse wealth of programming power that would otherwise have been unavailable to it. Further, the effectiveness of the ad-hoc Linux programming team as a whole was a product of the fact that so many of its members occupied niches. This fact ensured a diversity of talent and interest which meant that the right person would be there to take on each of the "thousand tiny projects" which Morton describes as making up the larger project of building an operating system."
  • A niche of one
    In an post that I missed at the time, Technorati's Kevin Marks argues that even I have been focused too high on the curve. There's lots of room at the very bottom: "A true long tail business is one that copes with the ultimate niches - where there are just one, or even zero customers. You need to be sure that your submission model can cope with these limiting cases and not choke, especially as you do not know a priori which ones are going to garner customers. So, what businesses fit this model? The obvious one is eBay. Omidyar's model of a perfect marketplace is tuned so that it is stable if you don't find a buyer (eBay takes a small listing fee), but works better if you do (eBay takes a percentage). Another example is cafepress. They don't even set a listing fee, working on the assumption that the effort to build a product list is enough of a hurdle, and have prices set so that a production run of one item is cost effective for them (they aggregate sales and pay monthly)."
  • Field Hockey TV
    Quite a few people have noted that sports is a classic LT TV opportunity, with lots more games played (from high school football to professional sports abroad) than there are broadcast channels to carry them to the potential niche viewerships around the world. One example is field hockey, which is big outside the US. Enter FieldHockey.TV: "Since inception, in October 2003, more than 1.5 million viewers have tuned in to FieldHockeyTV. Currently, Spring 2005, between 20- and 30,000 viewers connect weekly to the World’s Global Hockey Channel. During events, such as the Hockey Champions Trophy, our viewing numbers show a dramatic increase to 50-70,000 viewers per week."
  • Long Tail counter-insurgency
    John Robb applies the theory to the US military operations in the Middle East, and (in the earlier post linked from this post) to the insurgents themselves: " The complexity of the threat posed by open source warfare in Iraq has accelerated the US military's use of outsourcing. Traditionally, the long tail has been used to describe the number of support personnel (the tail) required to support combat troops (the tooth). Tooth-to-tail ratios have grown over the years as the complexity and resource intensity of modern combat has increased. In essence, modern warfare requires a loooong tail of support troops. The US military's tooth-to-tail ratio is approximately 1 to 10 (or more)."
  • The LT of drugs
    One the key drivers of the Long Tail is the democratizing of the tools of production. John Hagel here brings that perspective to a Peter Schwartz article on the increasing micro-production of drugs such as meth: "As in other domains, this move towards distributed creation and production is being driven by more affordable and accessible tools of production.... The backwoods meth producer is a direct descendant of the backwoods hootch producer during the Prohibition. We may not like what they are producing, but history has shown they will be quite creative in finding ways to produce it themselves. The MIT fab lab participant, the remix DJ at the local hip nightclub, the extreme sports enthusiast and the backwoods meth producer all share a common passion – producing goods and experiences on their own terms."
  • James Fallows
    Fallows has an interesting column in the the NY Times about the power of that other low-cost P2P distribution network, the US Mail. He focuses mostly on the Netflix example (mentioning Long Tail implications) and then brings in others: "Consider Postal Service fulfillment of transactions made on the Internet. About two million prescriptions a day - roughly one-fifth of the total - are delivered by first-class mail. EBay's vendors list five million new items daily, and those that are sold ship mainly by mail. One Pitney Bowes study found that online retailers were increasingly using paper catalogs sent through the mail to steer people to their sites."
  • Digital Music News
    As I was posting my case for variable pricing in the online music stores, HMV in the UK was preparing to roll out just that in its new online service. From this news report: "Some tracks will dip as low at 39 pence (72 cents), halving iTunes and Virgin price points. As part of the HMV plan, developing artist tracks and deeper catalog will carry the lower price points, while premium songs will carry higher tags. In the end, HMV will buck the uniform pricing approach popularized by iTunes, a result that major labels have been pushing for."
  • PayPal
    Lowering the economic costs of niches is key to the Long Tail, especially for small purchases such as a single track. I mentioned in the post on variable pricing that below $0.49/track the transaction costs of processing the payment can start to get in the way. So the news that PayPal is changing its policies to encourage smaller transaction is good to hear. From the report: "PayPal’s transaction fee is typically volume-based, and ranges from 1.9 to 2.9 percent in addition to a charge of $0.30 per transaction. In the case of [the new model for] micro payments, which PayPal describes as payments of less than $2, the fee is 5 percent plus $0.05 per transaction."
  • TrivialTV
    Extending on my post on a better way to find music, here's a good essay on how to find better TV, offering meaningful filter categories such as: "*by genre (gameshows, sitcoms, dramas, news, talk, animation, self-help, etc.) *by decade ('80s, '90s, etc) *by delivery time (morning, daytime, fringe, primetime, late night) *by delivery outlet (broadcast, cable, syndicated, mobile phone) *by network...and so on."
  • Media Influencer
    Classical music enthusiasts are programming software to play previously unplayable compositions, bringing them to a broader audience. Adriana puts this in LT context: "To me, this shows another crack in the traditional producer-distribution-audience models. It is obvious that scholars and professionals were not the audience. The two Beethoven enthusiasts were first doing what they wanted to enjoy and couldn't find and now they are hoping to reach the mainstream in a way academicians and virtuosos can't. As Doc Searls points out, this is the demand side supplying itself."
  • Steven Johnson
    Steven links to his Discover column, which applies the Long Tail theory to cites with fascinating result: "Urban theorist Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that, paradoxically, huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won’t be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there’s an entire button-store district. Subcultures thrive in big cities for this reason as well: If you have idiosyncratic tastes, you’re much more likely to find someone who shares those tastes in a city of 9 million people."
  • Warner Music
    "Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman and CEO, announced a download-only "e-label," in which artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years....The e-label will permit recording artists to enjoy a "supportive, lower-risk environment" without as much pressure for huge commercial hits, Bronfman said. In addition, artists signed to the e-label will retain copyright and ownership of their master recordings." Note that Universal has also created a digital-only label, called UME.
  • Matt McAlister
    Matt analyzes the incentives of that explain user participation in things like Wikipedia, Amazon review and Netflix rating, and why it's so smart for the services to encourage that: "Netflix makes it harder and harder for a customer to consider leaving the system for a competitor. The more the user sees benefit from participation, the more they give. The more they give, the less likely they are to leave. Even if there was a way to take your data to another service, the system builds loyalty to the brand and the user experience that they’ve spent time and energy learning."
  • New York Times
    More on the woeful economics of the new-release DVD business in a fact-filled piece on Blockbuster and Movie Gallery: "Knowing that it would be difficult to match Wal-Mart and Best Buy's prices on the sale of new DVD's without wreaking havoc on its margins, Blockbuster has instead decided to concentrate on the sales of used videos. Next year, the company plans to make selling and trading used DVDs and its video game operation priorities."
  • Arnold Kling
    A really excellent mapping of the Long Tail to politics. If today's Democrats and Republicans are the Head, everyone unsatisfied by this bipolar choice is the Tail. "The Long Tail is not the political center. It is not a third party waiting to form. It is not a coalition. It is not a "silent majority" of either the right or left. It is simply every variety of political belief, from Greens to Libertarians, that does not fit within the two major parties.... The key point is that the size of the Long Tail, and its rapid growth, represents the most significant political phenomenon of our time. What you will start to notice is the tendency for politics to reflect tension between the Long Tail and the major political parties."
  • Hollywood Reporter
    An important column on the LT forces disrupting TV. Read it all. Excerpt: "In a world in which consumers can increasingly access precisely what they want, on the device and in the location they chose, for the price they want to pay, the ability to use, repackage and market content to meet users' higher customization, personalization and functionality standards gets you a lucrative seat at the big table. But playing that game means changing relationships at every level of the media and entertainment supply and demand food chain -- from content distributors, providers and producers, as well as advertisers and marketers."
  • Jeff Jarvis
    Jeff rightly complains about the nonsense of "A lists". The point is not to be the most popluar blog on the web (about 12,999,999 blogs will lose that test); it's to be well-respected within your niche. Comparing one niche against another is pointless. "In this new world of choice and control at the edges, it’s the niches, and those who can pull them together, who win. Besides, a universal top n00 list is even a bad execution of big-media think. When Ad Age gives you lists of magazine revenue, it separates women’s and entertainment and business publications; in big-media, those pass as niches and they are far more valuable comparisons. When talking about newspapers, you don’t lump in metro papers with town papers with trade papers; it’s a meaningless lump. When somebody can tell me who the queen of the knitting bloggers is, then I’ll listen…. and so will knitting advertisers."
  • Microsoft
    If you can read past the press-release jargon, Microsoft is saying that it sees online distribution as a way to access the Long Tail of videogames: ""By making our titles available through Games-on-Demand services, we can broaden our reach to new audiences and monetize additional release windows," said Ed Ventura....Exent's distribution channels help us to extend the lifecycle of our game catalog"
  • AP (via CNN)
    Another inspirational story of finding your audience in the LT: "One by one, the big houses in New York looked at "Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles," but eventually said no, suggesting his theory that signals outside cells control genes was too radical for mainstream readers. "I wasted a whole year with them," Lipton fumed. Then he signed on with an independent press that relies heavily on Amazon.com Inc. Since then, he and his publisher say, more than 42,000 copies have sold in six months."
  • The New Yorker
    Jim Surowiecki on the rise of the DVD as a Long Tail market that favors smaller and independent films: "The new DVD audience is so diverse that companies can target niche markets and still sell millions of disks. Because specialized markets are more predictable, the risk of failure is much lower, and so small-to-mid-budget movies can be very profitable indeed. In the U.S., a big-budget epic like “Troy” may have earned nearly twice as much money at the box office as “Ray” did, but, once DVD sales are included, that ratio drops to just 1.2 to 1. And, once you take into account the difference in production and marketing costs, “Ray,” a far cheaper film to make, starts to look like a truly excellent investment."
  • Technology Review
    Another story on books that were blogged in progress. It begins as a review of John Battelle's "The Search" and then segues into the connection between search and the LT: "Battelle is interested in the application of search to untapped markets, or "long tails". In the context of e-commerce, long tails have three implications. First, via the Internet, products with little demand can, collectively, create a market exceeding that of the few bestsellers. Second, in the same way that it enables a proliferation of markets, the Internet enables a proliferation of vendors. Finally, thanks to search, a shift from mass to niche markets is likely." The author notes that "the blog-powered process that [the two writers] are using may be an effective way to refine ideas and ensure their survival" but warns that it may lead to the ideas feeling a bit stale when they finally emerge in print.
  • PR Squared
    A PR strategy for a LT world: "The PR industry is notoriously bad at “scaling;” it seems each new account creates the need for a new Account Exec. How the heck can we afford to keep tabs (much less influence) a 24x7 conversation with multiple millions of individual consumers? My guess is that we’ll adopt a hybrid approach, in which account teams continue to try to influence “old world” media and “strategic” blogs, as well as those growing numbers of niche-oriented blog aggregator sites. Meanwhile, we’ll develop “contextual strike teams” … The members of this class of “conversationistas” will be culled from across the agency, tasked with participating in ongoing dialogues in blogs, wikis, vlogs, et cetera, ad infinitum, not as PR people so much as “genuinely interested consumers.”
  • Blogarithms
    A thoughtful essay on the future of Public Radio in a LT world: "Radio and TV are going to have to adjust to a new economy: the economy in which the long tail plays a major role. The music industry is painfully making this transformation now. The movie business is fighting the change in classic innovators-dilemma style. TV doesn’t know what to do. Its viewers are leaving in droves, and the three major networks’ reaction so far is to reduce not only the cost but also the quality of programs through the reality-TV and tabloid formulas....Public radio is [in the same bind]. The real problem is coming from the fact that listeners want long-tail time-shifted content. They want to hear programs that are more meaningful to them, and they want to listen at their convenience. The entire broadcast-radio system, with its distribution, simply can’t provide what the customers want. "
  • Seth Godin
    On the appeal of free content, not just for the consumer but also the producer: "Now you have paid online radio and free online radio. Paid online video and free online video. At first, the paid stuff is good and the free stuff is less good. But soon, producers seeking an audience start to make their stuff free. Because when they do, the audience goes up 100x. And then, in order to compete, others do the same thing. Wouldn't you if you had a touring band? Wouldn't you if you had already exhausted your DVD sales and wanted a big enough audience for your sequel?"
  • OnoTech
    The LT of events, beyond the big ones: "What about implicit events, like the opening hours of the local go-kart race track? Is that an event? What about the daily classes at 6pm at Hot Yoga 101 or Fred's Karate Studio? They are scheduled for a certain time, or available any time; they are activities "to do" - the public can walk in and pay a fee - are they events? And then let's look at that 49ers game. Maybe 50,000 people get tickets. Maybe a million watch it on one of several local Bay Area TV stations. So one physical event generates multiple virtual events. 150 local bars have "49ers game Sunday" special events. When one adds all of these up -- and throws in the Meetups, the radio-controlled airplane club meetings, the church services, the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the extension courses at local universities, the City Council of Sunnyvale public forum for comment on the new library... I consistently get numbers like 50,000 events a week in the Bay Area. Can you say Long Tail?"
  • Searchline
    LT search-engine marketing: "The Long Tail approach to keywords advocates the use of "tail terms" - relatively low volume, low-cost phrases composed of two or more keywords. For example, in a search campaign where the term "sheets" may be too broad and expensive to compete effectively, tail terms such as "linen sheets" and "Egyptian cotton sheets" may yield a better performance. Why? Because tail terms contain more information about the query, and thus are more apt to directly meet the needs of the user. This equals more conversions and better brand stickiness."
  • Barry Ritholtz
    One of the open economics questions of the Long Tail is whether prices should go or down as you down the tail. Obviously it depends on the market and product, but Barry looks at the example of music. "The movie studios, to their credit, use a form of dynamic pricing -- they intelligently recognize that a content item's value is highest when first released, and then subsequently fades. The music labels have mostly avoided this strategy -- but perhaps that's changing. I just noticed this little tidbit on Amazon: a long list of interesting CDs for sale on Amazon for between $6 and $10."
  • P.S.
    For folksonomy junkies, an article about what happens when you display "tag clouds" as powerlaws. "We can study a culture by studying the differences in the power law approximated by the tag clouds used by people of that culture. We could even measure cultural eartquakes by measuring the difference between the tag cloud being generated before and after a certain event." [That seems like a very academic way of looking at a conventional buzz index, but it uses the Long Tail as an example so I can't resist linking to it.]
  • Pandora
    The music recommendation service formerly known as Savage Beast is rolling out a new consumer service that builds custom radio stations built around music similar to the music you like. What fascinating about the service (I visited them a few weeks ago) is that they determine similarity not by what other people listen to but what their small army of musicologists identify as related traits in the music itself. You'll get delightful stuff you never would have thought of. Sign up to the beta and check it out.
  • Willamette Week (Portland)
    A fascinating glimpse into the world of indpendent music labels, of which Portland seems to have many: "The majority of Portland's labels are "mom and pop"-sized businesses, employing up to five people while generating modest cash flow. The exception, of course, is the local swingster-lounge band Pink Martini, whose Heinz Records label has sold 140,000 of Hang on Little Tomato, the band's second self-released album-a staggering number in the world of independents, where cracking five digits for a single release is considered a success."
  • Jeff Jarvis
    Why aren't established companies able to take advantage of Long Tail opportunities quickly? Jeff Jarvis, who until recently was a colleague of mine at Advance/Conde Nast, explains that it's about the fear of hurting cash flow: "It makes them complacent: ‘Look at all the money (still) rolling in.’ It makes them think that if they just tweak this and that — if they can still get away with raising their rates even as their audience and value are shrinking — they will continue to keep milking cash from that old cow. It makes them overly cautious: ‘Nobody hurt Bessie!’"
  • Andrew Kantor
    A good USA Today column on the end of TV channels: "Compare the TV model to music. Music is released. Television is scheduled. That's going to change. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has shown people a different model: one where you get what you want, when you want it - where the channel model is replaced by the site model. Channels are limited; sites are not."
  • DVDStation
    DVD Station, the kiosk model that's my favorite example of the Long Tail in a traditional retail environment, has released a fascinating powerpoint presentation on their strategy. Lots of data, insight and sharp analysis, including such gems as the fact that the economics of DVDs actually improve the further down the tail you go (because they're cheaper to acquire and customers are happier with them)
  • Salesforce.com
    More on the Long Tail of software. Salesforce.com's new strategy is to create a way for Long Tail developers and customers in hypernarrow industry niches to easily connect, with the usual complexity of software shielded by a common, web-based platform. From the News.com article: "At the heart of CEO Marc Benioff's strategy is the idea that companies with deep industry knowledge will have more success creating their own specialized programs than Salesforce could."
  • Bob Frankston
    In an essay titled "DRM chops off the Long Tail", the legendary co-creator of Visicalc launches one of his trademark tirades at Wintel for playing along with Hollywood and building harsh content restrictions into their next operating system: "Microsoft and Intel seem to think it is in their interest to cooperate with this approach and limit the ability of users to find new opportunities. The long tail gets truncated. It's like Cisco helping China control the spread of 'bad ideas'."
  • Bob Lefsetz (via Barry Ritholtz)
    A very grumpy music insider lets loose with a scorching screed in favor of free music: "Get your head out of your ass. This isn't about giving away music, this is about breaking bands. People have to be exposed to the music SOMEHOW! If you don't seed the system, HOW WILL THEY?"
  • Internet Stock Blog
    An analysis of Amazon's Long Tail tactics: "But Amazon has a two-pronged strategy to monetize the emergence of third-party sellers and producers. First, it has acquired two companies (BookSurge and Custom Flicks) to facilitate the direct publishing of books and movies which it can then sell. Second, Amazon is pushing third-party sales via its web site and providing e-commerce tools for large etailers. 975,000 venders now sell on Amazon's site, and 28% of Amazon's sales came from third-party sellers in Q2, up from 24% a year earlier."
  • Technogoggles
    A look at Yahoo as a Long Tail company (which, BTW, they are, from their music and video strategy to basic search): "They want to get people innovating around their products to see what they can themselves produce, to see where the market can go, to get the early developers, the people at the 'edges' doing stuff which could potentially be mainstream - because the people at the edges are are usually those ahead of the crowd. "
  • Nick Gillespie
    Nick, who's written often and insightfully about the "the culture boom" that come with abundant choice, finds upside in the dim current movie climate. "As Hollywood—always a fabulously self-involved place—worries about ticket slumps and slowing DVD sales, those of us who actually enjoy movies—and music, and literature, and art—can relax and enjoy more of what we want when we want it. And we can spend a little time musing on why Russell Crowe is so angry. He may be fabulously well-paid and world famous, but he is a movie star at a time when stars—and content producers in general—have less and less power over their audience."
  • Hal Varian
    Varian discusses an important recent economics analysis of used books sales on Amazon, which hints at the answer to a big Long Tail question: how does the rise of the tail affect the head? The answer seems to be a rising tail lifts all boats. Used books, says Jeff Bezos, may lead customers to "visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads to higher sales of new books." The data appear to confirm this: "It appears that only about 16 percent of the used book sales directly cannibalized new book sales, suggesting that Amazon's used-book market added $63.2 million to its profits."
  • The Big Picture
    Barry Ritholtz's must-read blog continues his analysis of the decline of the mainstream media and entertainment industries. "Any content industry that finds itself dramtically reducing variety or quality or both, is an industry heading for long term trouble -- especially if the internet can be used to easily and cheaply find an adequate or superior substitute. "
  • Jason Calacanis
    Another advantage of the Long Tail: people are happier there! Jason, who runs a network of more than 100 blogs, writes a great post about how much more fun it is to do what you're passionate about, on your own terms. Which pretty much describes blogging, except his bloggers *get paid*: "If someone loses their passion for a subject they can simple glide over to another subject in the network and become inspired all over again. If they have two or three passions in their life they blog about all of them as much—or as little—as they want. No filters, no politics, no commute, and no office."
  • BookBlog
    I just stumbled on this interesting observation from October of last year, which I'll quote here at length: "The Long Tail article reveals the limitations of the Clay Shirky power law model. Several years ago, Shirky explained how the top of the peer production curve segues into the mass market. The aggregation of interest raises popular bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, and popular open source software projects like Linux far above the tail, to join the ranks of mass market mainstream hits. The Power Law essay amputates the long tail, and translates the head of the peer production curve into familiar mass market terms -- the creation and packaging of celebrities. By focusing at the top of the curve, where peer production segues into the mass market, the Power Law obscures the the economic and social principles that create profit and value from the Long Tail.The Power Law essay implied that A-list bloggers were the big winners in the peer ecosystem. By contrast, Anderson's essay suggests that the relationship between the head and the tail is symbiotic instead. "
  • Becker-Posner Blog
    Really just an excuse to link to this blog, a collaboration of two of my heroes. It's actually a bit hard going, but it started off very well with a reference to Hayek that applies equally well to the Long Tail: "Blogging...is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market)." I'd argue that the Long Tail is another mechanism.
  • Lbr
    More on the Long Tail and libraries: "What struck me is the extent to which realizing that filter role -- guiding folks to discover materials they might not have otherwise imagined -- is fundamental service of Ranganathan's Third Law of Library Science. In fact, Ranganathan's own descriptions of the effects of the Third Law (from The Five Laws of Library Science) are Long Tail examples -- books that had sat on the shelf untouched for years behind the walls of the closed stacks found huge popularity in the advent of browsable open stacks and a cataloguing structure that was heavily cross-indexed. " Who knew?
  • Paracelsus
    Another encouraging tale of self-publishing: "One of my favorite books of all time, "Apollo: The Race to the Moon" by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox, went out of print soon after it was published in 1989. A friend of mine happened to own a copy, but when I went to buy one for myself, only expensive collectors' editions could be had. Recently the book was finally picked up again by South Mountain Books. The publishers of South Mountain Books were... Charles Murray and Catherine Cox." Now rank 282,000 on Amazon.
  • Nature
    An analysis of citations of scientific papers published in Nature reveals a classic Pareto short tail: "We have analysed the citations of individual papers in Nature and found that 89% of last year’s figure was generated by just 25% of our papers." Any speculation on why citations aren't more evenly spread around? [hat tip to Ma Yue]
  • Paul Musgrave
    For those who wanted more on the connection between libraries and the LT..."Libraries are uniquely placed in many communities to serve as distributors of the books in the long tail; using the same strategies Amazon has devised to gather metadata about its collection will help its patrons find what they need. But such a strategy will entail some cost, and more disruption to a library's identification--the essence of metadata, of course, is that it is a democratization of authority, yielding bottom-up reviews and recommendations generated by the participation of "voice" (through user reviews) and "market" (through mute user behavior)."
  • Cory Doctorow
    Cory rightly celebrates the efforts of the BBC to lead the way in opening their archives and get everthing out there, every which way. The crowning jewel of this is the Creative Archive, which "is an attempt to digitize all the programming the BBC has commissioned, clear the copyrights and post it online with a Creative Commons-like license. This will allow Britons to download the BBC's content, distribute it and noncommercially remix it into their own films, music, gags, projects and school reports."
  • Techdirt
    Amazon continues to expand its longtailedness with the purchase of a DVD-on-demand publisher to go with its earlier purchase of a print-on-demand publisher. "This will help them offer more niche DVDs for sale, without having to worry about inventory issues or orders from other companies that could take quite some time. "
  • Inside Higher Ed
    An interesting and lengthy essay on the Long Tail of college classes and university education: "The potential lies in courses that are not yet offered online but can be found at 2,400 U.S. institutions. Year after year, a wealth of such courses, in highly focused topics such as Tagalog, Random Matrix Theory, and African traditional religion, appear in scores of college catalogues. This indicates a clear and widespread interest among current students in courses on diverse, super-specialized, arcane subject matter. There is no telling what the potential is for additional audiences of adult and returning students."
  • John Locke
    A long but thoughtful post on music, touching on a some of the pre-filtering and post-filtering ideas I've been exploring here. "Filtering is essential in an economy of abundance. When there’s an overwhelming array of similar items, how do you choose? The recording companies have provided filters by creating specific genres, attempting to classify each artist into one (and only one) genre, based on what the music sounded like. They hire a few people as “experts” in these artificial genres to pick artists they think will sell, based on the arbitrary genres they just set up. It’s not a very effective filtering system, but it’s the best we could do, when the filtering had to come before the production, because of the scarcity built into physical production."

    "With production growing abundant, this is no longer necessary—we can produce the music first, and filter later. Anyone can be a music critic, and recommend their favorites to their friends. Word-of-mouth has long been recognized as the most effective marketing strategy, and with an abundant music landscape, it has become more important than ever. People find music based on recommendations from people they trust. To truly influence people to buy a particular band, you need to be trustworthy—you need to have a good reputation. This is the essence of branding."
  • Bubblegeneration
    Two brilliant reports from Umair Haque, MBA extraordinaire, free for the downloading and printing out: 1) The Atomizing Hand: The Strategy and Economics of Peer Production (400kb ppt); 2) The New Economics of Media: Micromedia, Connected Consumption, and the Snowball Effect (500kb ppt)
  • Aymmetrical Information
    The fab Megan McArdle takes another swipe at the "tyranny of choice" crowd. After fisking some NYT contributors, she asks the obvious question: "By what authority will choices be limited? Who will have such power to limit choice, and how will they decide? Even scarier, how will those who argue that we were happier when we weren't aware of other choices keep us in this blissful state of ignorance? Just how Soviet a system are they wishing for?"
  • Jason Kitcat
    Although I get asked a question about it at nearly every talk, I've been steering warily clearly of the Long Tail of politics. Jason, however, dives right in, complete with charts and infographics! "Like Amazon or the iTunes Music Store, the new ‘market’ in e-democracy is down the tail, using the low-cost, mass-reach of the Internet to service these less influential people’s democratic needs."
  • Thomas Hawk
    Hawk interviews Bill Fisher, CEO of DVDStation, my favorite Long Tail DVD rental kiosk startup (yes, there are more than one). They're launching a "Sub5" program. Any film that has grossed less then $5 million at the domestic box office need only fill out an online form and they're eligible to be carried at these kiosks (which burn DVDs on demand from a multi-terrabyte hard drive). 50/50 profit sharing. Smart.
  • Arizona Republic
    A good piece on the rise of niche media, especially books. Wal-Mart takes the blockbusters and after that it fragments radically: "`Publishers are gravitating toward what I call microgenres,' says Penny C. Sansevieri, founder of Author Marketing Experts in San Diego. `You used to have chick lit, but now you have mommy lit, hen lit, chick lit for African-American women. They're breaking this down to the point that it's becoming very myopic.'" Warning: I'm quoted.
  • John Hegel
    I'm doing a chapter addressing the Tyranny of Choice problem, and Virginia Postrel's work has been very useful. John discusses it, and adds "Postrel has hit on something really significant here that helps to explain the paradox of choice that is playing out around us: expanding choice begets even more choice. The more choice we have, the more we have to decide what it is that we really want. The more we reflect on what we really want, the more we end up getting involved in the creation of the goods that we buy and use. This in part explains why, in a growing range of domains, we are seeing customers get more actively involved in co-creation of products and services. The more we participate in the creation of products and services, the more choices we end up creating for ourselves."
  • Hobby Princess
    An interesting perspective on how economics change as you go down the tail. As you move from pros to amateurs, selling gives way to gift and barter. Sharing "is a form of exchange that is definitively Long Tail but not necessarily that of fashion business. A site like supernaturale.com (which is only one example of the many) has as much as 2600 users – many of them consumers and producers at the same time. An increasing number of people also have their own web pages where they sell stuff, and gifts are also exchanged for promotional purposes (promo swaps). Still, for these people selling is not the point. Crafting is."
  • Koranteng's Toli
    Koranteng posts an exhaustive and insightful review of recommendation systems. I won't try to summarize, but if you're into filters and all that this is well worth checking out, as is the rest of his blog, which is not only deep but beautifully written. He's clearly a genius of some sort; the only thing I can't figure out is why he's still working for IBM on Lotus Notes.
  • Glenn Reynolds
    The man behind Instapundit writes about the history of work and argues we're ending the big industry era, thanks to the tools of peer production: "It's not just that fewer people can do the same work, it's that they don't need a big company to provide the infrastructure to do the work, and, in fact, they may be far more efficient without the big company and all the inefficiencies and stumbling blocks that its bureaucracy and "technostructure" tend to produce. In the old days, you had to put up with those problems because you needed the big organization to do the job. Now, increasingly, you don't. Goliath's clumsiness used to be made up for by the fact that he was strong. But now the Davids are muscling up without bulking up. So why be a Goliath?"
  • Early Indications
    A reminder of the changing history of powerlaw thinking online. "Given [powerlaw distributions] investors began to argue that the Internet was a new kind of market, with high barriers to entry that made incumbents' positions extremely secure. Michael Mauboussin wrote a paper in late 1999 called "Absolute Power." In it he asserted that "power laws . . .strongly support the view that on-line markets are winner-take-all." Since that time, Google has challenged Yahoo, weblogs have markedly deteriorated online news sites' traffic, and the distinction between "on-line markets" and plain old markets is getting harder to maintain. Is the Zipf distribution somehow changing? Were power laws wrongly applied or somehow misunderstood?"
  • John Blossom
    The Long Tail of libraries. Following up on a panel we were on, he suggest that networked collections and interlibrary loans allow librarians to focus on niche material: "The good news about "the long tail" is that it is likely to free up librarians to do what they do best - manage finite collections of content with high levels of expertise while leaving to others the managing of massively popular content and specialized collections beyond their focus. Rather than focusing on easily reproduced content available commercially in electronic formats librarians can focus on obtaining and preserving truly rare content that is most important to their local patrons' needs. The rest can be "borrowed" or licensed on a far more global level with lots of contextualization from local librarians and community enthusiasts to enhance its local value."
  • Thomas Hawk
    Hawk comments on a Motley Fool piece arguing that the future of music is local bands, combining performance with the power of local search to build audiences: "It will be the long tail of local music that will drive music going forward. Instead of hundreds of musical artists selling millions of CDs, you will have millions of bands selling hundreds of CDs. Record labels in their present form won't serve much of a purpose in a "bunt single" scenario like that. Google? Yahoo!? Microsoft? They will be the ones wielding the promotional weaponry."
  • Imaginary Planet
    Some implications of post-filtering: "1) Feedback arrives after publication, not before. Editors catch typos and errors before mass distribution or distribution. 2) Critics and taste arbiters become more visible to the public eye. In the past, acquisitions editors and people who signed the talent toiled in obscurity, rarely establishing a distinctive voice or a public presence. 3) Relying on a band of amateurs to perform the filter function [risks] more dependence on physical review copies and other bribes in exchange for attention."
  • Garrick Van Buren
    Some lyrical thinking on the economics of abundance. "**In the age of scarcity, price is the value of receiving something wanted. **In the age of plenty, price is the value of filtering out something unwanted. As Rob McColley sings in TeeVee: `...’cause the free stuff you get these days I’d pay to keep away from me.'"
  • Nick Carr
    Mr "IT Doesn't Matter" is "looking at past examples of long tails to see what can be learned about their evolution and the way the Internet affected their economics. Here's the best example I've come up with: auto parts." He noes that once you had to take what the garage gave you, but now it's a buyers's market. Indeed. One of our research projects is looking at eBay's car parts market, which is among their most popular. Our question, like Carr's: what's the effect on pricing?
  • PRWeek
    An article on how PR professionals can play the Long Tail: "In the 'Long Tail,' media coverage comes in great and small numbers, and they all have influence," Steve Rubel says. "Putting bloggers on the same playing field [as the national press] - that's 'Long Tail' thinking." Dan Berkowitz says that most PR professionals target the major business press, but that strategy is more complicated now due to media fragmentation. He suggests going beyond "the media" and targeting all manners of influencers. Berkowitz notes that some PR professionals might balk and say, "This is just overwhelming. I can't think of these 300,000 little outlets." But he adds that applying "Long Tail" thinking to PR is merely a new challenge that requires them to be more open-minded."
  • Not Quite a Blog
    Joe's starting a podcast series on niche music called "Tales from the Long Tail". "In this first installment I play a few excerpts from sexy and sometimes raunchy Princess Superstar including Wet! Wet! Wet!, Bad Baby sitter and Kool Keith's Ass. Then I play an excerpt from DwarfStar, a song by the 18th-century cellic ghost-circus that is Rasputina. Finally, I close out with the divariffic Diva Destruction covering Radiohead's Climbing the Walls off of Cleopatra Records' tribute comp., Anyone Can Play Radiohead."
  • RexBlog
    Long Tail podcasting. (This is a high condensed version--check out the post for much more on each): "Here are a few examples of the kind of podcasts I'd actually pay for: 1. City tours; 2. Mash-up music-news programming: I'd pay for a version of a 30 minute program of business news each morning that had jock-jam-type music in the background playing at my jog pace. 3. Seminar sessions: I doubt I'm going to attend your $1,200 conference. But if it sounds compelling enough, I might pay you $100 to download each session a few minutes after it is finished. 4. MP3 books -- self-publishing model: 5. Motivational, self-help, weight-loss, exercise, how-to audio: 6. Acoustiguide should sell anything they produce via iTunes. 7. CEOs. I would gladly pay Apple iTunes for an RSS-enabled daily feed of anything Bill Gates wants to talk about each morning. (I'm serious.)"

November 02, 2005

Becoming a Google Halloween costume: priceless

This totally made my day. Google's AdSense team dressed up as a 300-foot Long Tail for Halloween. And Esther Dyson posted the picture:

Googletail

Long Tail Camp

Foo camp was great. I hear Bar camp was, too. Now, in the same vein, comes...

Long Tail Camp.

Long Tail Camp is an open, welcoming event for geeks to camp out overnight, get wired on caffienated beverages and think really fast about the long tail, its applications, and implications. Nov 11th, 2005.

Nothing to do with me (indeed, I'm not entirely sure it's serious). But if someone knows more and would like me to update this post with details, email me.

UPDATE: Eran Globen writes with more:

My name's Eran Globen, I'm one of the originators and organizers of Long-Tail camp. First to clear out any misunderstandings, Long-Tail camp is on the cusp between serious and parody. It was first announced on our blog, Supr.c.ilio.us: The Blog, in this post.

Since then we've received some support from the community and it seems that there is indeed some interest to at least have some fun with the idea. We will be having the first meeting of Long-Tail camp in our upcoming launch party at midnite on November 11 (venue undecided yet) and when that meeting is over we intend to release the idea out to the world and let everyone do with it as they will. We already have interest in having Long-Tail camps in SF, NY state and Australia.

The wiki is meant to inspire, help organize and serve as a location to aggregate the experiences from various camps.I think that together, many small camps can make just as much of a difference and be just as much fun (or more) as one big camp.

Thank you for your interest and for creating this great meme.

Eran Globen.
http://supr.c.ilio.us/blog/
http://hellonline.com/blog/

November 01, 2005

How big could the Long Tail get?

Over at Mediabistro, there's been some interesting discussion on the size of the Long Tail in books that deserves some comment here..

In response to a previous Mediabistro article about the LT, a reader wrote:

Even if half of the books sold on Amazon are long tail and Amazon is just 10% of all book sales, they make up only 5 percent of a book publisher's actual sales, suggesting that the long tail isn't a vast and untapped marketplace, but simply the 5 percent tail. Am I missing something?

It's a fair question, especially since our subsequent analysis suggests that it's closer to a quarter of Amazon's sales. So does that mean that the LT is just 2.5% of the book industry?

Richard Nash, another Mediabistro reader answers some of the question for me:

"Overall the Amazon market share numbers are correct. And they are also correct for Soft Skull in aggregate. But the interesting thing is that in Year Two of a given title's life, Amazon could be responsible for as much as two-thirds of a book's sales. Now those numbers in unit terms could be too small to make it worth a big publisher's time to keep it in print, but for an indie, or a university press, having, say, half your in-print titles moving 50 units a year (in our case that would be for 100 titles) that's about an extra $25K/year...and close to pure margin.

"The appeal of the Long Tail in the world of music is that digital downloads have close to zero marginal cost: They're digital copies! Books of course have a relatively high marginal cost; each additional book could be a dollar, say. But in practice, what we do is make a guess about demand, and print, say, 3,000 books. After about a year, that book has basically had its day in brick and mortar stores and, I would argue, the value of the inventory at that point should be written down to about zero. The books are worthless.

"But in fact they do keep selling! Maybe only 50 units a year, as I said, but it is pure marginal revenue! And, for a publisher that has $1 million in sales, and profit margins of 5 percent, an extra $25K in revenue on which the marginal cost is basically zero (the inventory would otherwise have been pulped), you've increased profitability from $50 to $75K!

"Now that's the short-term benefit from the Long Tail. And there are limits: For 50 units a year, it would be impossible to justify a reprint (unless the book were short enough that you could get $2/book unit cost through short-run digital printing...). The long-term benefit would be when eBooks become viable through advances in reader technology, and the marginal cost of a book truly becomes zero."

Richard's right, but there's more. For certain categories, such as documentaries, a Long Tail retailer such as Netflix can represent a huge proportion of the market. Netflix alone accounted for half of the US business for Capturing the Friedmans, for instance. And the used book market, which is far more Long Tail than new books, now accounts for 8.4% of all book sales.

Meanwhile, in music (or at least for the paid part): digital music sales represent 6% of the business, and the LT represents about 30% of that. It's anyone's guess what's going on in the file-trading world, but some BigChampagne stats we've seen suggest that it's far more LT than the commercial world.

Some industries will be more online than others. I suspect that media and entertainment will all be online in the not-too-distant future, and the head and tail will be in rough balance there. But food and perishable goods will stay largely offline, and the tail will remain tiny in that domain.

Let's stand back and look at the big picture. Jeff Bezos has often said that he thinks that online retail (which is the best, but not the only example of the "infinite shelf space" markets where the LT flourishes) will probably stabilize at 10%-15% of all US retail. Our own calculations, meanwhile, suggest that the LT is likely to account for no more than 50% of that (it's now between a quarter and a third for most such retailers, a percentage that's growing by a few percent each year as inventory expands, filters improve and buyer behavior adapts). For now, let's be conservative and call it a third.

If so, a back-of-the-envelope sizing calculation would put the potential size of the LT at 33% * 10% or 3.3% of all US retail. If that sounds insignificant, recall that annual US retail sales are $3.9 trillion (about 70% of the US economy). That would still make the LT a $125 billion opportunity.

The lesson: A small percentage of a big number is still a big number.

October 17, 2005

Meanwhile, at my day job....

I'm in Puerto Rico for the American Magazine Conference, where last night AdAge announced their annual A-List winners. I was named Editor of the Year. I'm both delighted and humbled by this, which is a every editor's dream. Most importantly, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my team at Wired, led by Bob Cohn, Thomas Goetz and Blaise Zerega, who have not only worked with me over the past four years to make Wired what it is today, but also carried much of the weight this summer, when I was working on the book.

Scott Donatan, the editor of AdAge, wrote "Madison and Vine" a hugely influential book about the convergence of the advertising and entertainment industries, which has taken on a life its own as a conference series and more. He knows the power of a big idea, and it's safe to say that the Long Tail, both book and this blog, figured into his choice of winner this year. To Scott, my team, and the executives at Conde Nast who have supported and encouraged us every step of the way, a huge thanks.

October 16, 2005

A Long Tail Game Manifesto

Metafistb_swGame industry verteran Greg Costikyan has launched a new independent games publisher called Manifesto Games that is built on a classic Long Tail strategy. Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The site will offer independently-developed games for sale via direct download--a single place where fans of offbeat and niche games can find "the best of the rest," the games that the retail channel doesn't think worth carrying. Three types of games will be offered: truly independent, original content from creators without publisher funding; the best PC games from smaller PC game publishers, including games in existing genres like wargames, flight sims, and graphic adventures; and niche MMOs.

While games were once the domain of hobbyists, today, the game industry considers any title that sells fewer than 1 million copies to be a failure; "The typical game store only has 200 facings," notes Costikyan, Manifesto’s CEO. "They can only carry best-sellers. On the Internet, there is no shelf space and you are limited only by how well you can market yourself, your site. This is where niche product can rule."

Manifesto believes that an independent game market is analogous to film or music, where less commercial offerings aimed at identifiable markets and produced at lower budgets than the "blockbusters" can achieve profitability and critical success. "The game industry has become moribund,” notes Costikyan. "Because of ballooning budgets and the narrowness of the retail channel, it is now essentially impossible for anything other than a franchise title or licensed product to obtain distribution. Yet historically, the major hits, the titles that have expanded the industry to new markets and created new audiences have been highly innovative. It is time for us to find a way to foster innovation, because it's not going to happen if we leave it to the large publishers."

You can read more about this in a long and lively interview Greg did with Joystiq, and follow all the progress of the company on his blog.

How could cats kill us all?

At Google, the geeks (which is to say, nearly everyone) entertain themselves over lunch in the famous cafeteria by asking each other thought-experiment questions that don't necessarily have a right answer. Think of those notorious puzzlers ("how many manhole covers are there in the US?") that Microsoft used to ask in job interviews.

Anyway, a friend who works there relates that one recent question was this: "How could cats kill everyone in the world?" Apparently even Larry and Sergey tossed out amusing answers.

Sadly, I immediately thought of a less amusing answer: Cats could be a vector for avian flu.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

October 10, 2005

Richard Florida, Shameless Hitist

SpikyAfter a century of hit-driven thinking, it's hard to shake the habit. Seeing the world though the lens of the most popular things is second nature, and we all do it. But that doesn't make it any less of a mistake. I call this tendency "hitism" (or, to go with my Tail metaphor, headism) and the latest example of it I spotted was an article in this month's Atlantic by Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class), entitled "The World is Spiky".

Florida's piece, which is nicely illustrated with fascinating maps, is meant to be a rebuttal to Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat." But it fails, but for a non-obvious reason.

John Hagel, who has posted his own interesting critique of the article, summarizes Florida's argument as follows:

Richard focuses on one particular quote from Tom’s book: “In a flat world you can innovate without having to emigrate.”  Richard responds that location still matters and that, by a variety of measures, the world is extremely spiky – meaning that activity is very concentrated in a relatively few locations.  Richard looks at:

    • population concentration in urban areas
    • light emissions (as an interesting proxy for economic activity)
    • patent filings
    • citations to scientists in leading fields to demonstrate this spikiness.

Focusing on the peaks definitely highlights the spikiness of the world.  For example,

When it comes to actual economic output, the ten largest US metropolitan areas combined are behind only the United States as a whole and Japan. New York’s economy alone is about the size of Russia’s or Brazil’s . . .  Together New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston have a bigger economy than all of China.  If US metropolitan areas were countries, they’d make up forty-seven of the biggest 100 economies in the world.

That seems indisputable. So what's the problem? The problem is Forida's insistence on measuring the world in terms of concentrations, which is akin to measuring culture in terms of hits. He defends this as follows:

Concentrations of creative and talented people are particularly important for innovation, according to the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas. Ideas flow more freely are honed more sharply, and can be put into practice more quickly when large numbers of innovators, implementers, and financial backers are in constant contact with one another, both in and out of the office.

Again, it's hard to argue with that. But Friedman's point is that ubiquitous connectivity--broadband, cellphones, FedEx and so on--can achieve much the same effect as proximity. Sure it's easier to be a software programmer in Silicon Valley. But if you happen to be Indian and poor that may not be an option. Not long ago, being a poor Indian would have meant that you couldn't help make the next great operating system. But now you can.

In between Florida's geographic spikes are a million smaller concentrations, ranging from one person to a few thousand. Many of them choose not to live in big cities; many other don't even have that option. They don't show up as bright line on a map where the scale is set by cities, but they're there all the same in a faint tint spread across the land, just as the niches in the Tail of entertainment demand curves are overshadowed by the Head. Collectively--and that's what networks do: collect people by connecting them--all these distributed talents can add up to a real force, even though they'll never earn a pointy peak on Florida's radar.

In a previous life, I briefly built a videogame software company based around a microcluster of talented programmers based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They lived there because it offered a concentration, to use Florida's term, of the quality-of-life factors that they cared about, from family to culture. Once, that would have come at the cost of their careers. But thanks to the Internet, they're now able to live in Friedman's Flat World, collaborating and competing with other programmers around the world. And there are hundreds of thousands of other talents like them, scattered to the four corners of the globe. They don't figure on Florida's map, but any one of them can have an impact. 

If you set your viewing scale to hits, that's all you'll see. But the real surprises are just as likely to come from below, in the noise below the spikes. I can't find Tallinn, Estonia amongst Florida's beautifully mapped peaks, but that didn't stop some smart people there from changing the world not once, but twice.

October 07, 2005

Friday Fanboy: Lego's Long Tail

DeathstarI'm often asked for Long Tail examples outside of entertainment, especially those that apply to physical goods, not just digital bits sent down a broadband connection. There are quite a few (aside from eBay, the obvious one), but perhaps my favorite is Lego.

If you just know Lego from kids' birthday parties and the display shelves of a toy store, you've only seen half of the company. The other half is the Lego that caters to enthusiasts, ranging from kids who want more than the stock kits to adults who have turned to bricks as the ultimate prototyper's toolkit.

It all starts with Lego's mail-order business, which began as a traditional shop-at-home catalog and is now increasing organized around its website. In a typical toy store, Lego may have a few dozen products. On its online store, it has nearly 1,000, ranging from bags of roof tiles to a $300 Deathstar (shown). If you want to see how different the online market is from the traditional retail market for Lego, check out their topsellers list. Only a few of those products are even available in stores, and most of those are inexpensive items added to other purchases to bring them over $50 and thus qualify for free shipping.

It's worth pausing here and considering the Long Tail implications of this. At least 90% of Lego's products are not available in traditional retail. They're only available in the catalogs and online, where the economics of inventory and distribution are far friendlier to niche products. Overall, those non-retail parts of the business represent 10-15% of Lego's annual $1.1 billion in sales. But the margins on these products are higher than the kits sold through Toys R Us, thanks to not having to share the revenues with the retailer. And because the virtual store can carry products for all Lego fans, from kids to adult enthusiasts, and not just the sweet spot of nine-year-old boys, the range of prices can be a lot greater online, from $1 bricks to the aforementioned $300 Star Wars kit.

The next level of Lego obsession is joining one its two clubs. One gets you the monthly Lego magazine and catalogs. The other is the online club, where all the games and other cool stuff is. Basic membership for both is free, but if your kids are really into Lego you might want to consider upgrading to the Brickmaster level, which brings a bigger magazine with a lot of DIY projects (like MAKE for bricks), five exclusive kits that show up at your door, and a ticket to Legoland.

After that, it's time to start getting serious about your own creations. Lego has a long history of offering tools online to encourage model trading and other collaborative peer production. In 2000, its "My Own Creation" project led to a contest for the best user-created model. The winner was  blacksmith shop that Lego licensed from its creator and offered for a while as a commercial kit. After that, it offered Lego Mosaic, which allowed users to upload images that were converted into 2D Lego brick patterns, downloadable by all.

Earlier this year, Lego launched its most ambitious peer-production effort of all, Lego Factory. The idea is that you download software that allows you to design and build virtual creations, then upload them to the company. A week or so later, you get a kit with the necessary parts delivered in a box with an image of your creation on the front. What's especially cool is that others can buy your kit, too, and there's a nice selection of user-created models, such as this truck, available for purchase. More than 77,000 models have been designed this way, and some of the best of them are also being released as official Lego products (Lego pays the creators a royalty).

However, all is not what it could be in Factory land. Mass customization is cool, but when you have 7,000 possible parts in 75 possible colors (that's more than a half-million possibilities), the fulfillment challenge of offering users full freedom quickly becomes overwhelming. So Lego limits choice in two ways. First, each model can only be built from a single set brick palette, such as car parts. Second, those parts come in pre-packaged bags of a fixed number of bricks, so you'll likely get more than you needed. If you're not careful, a simple vehicle that might cost less than $10 in retail can turn out to cost nearly $100 in Lego Factory simply because it uses those bags of parts inefficiently.

Fortunately, there's a hack-around. Lego enthusiasts compiled a database of what bags were in which palettes and created software that helped builders use those bags efficiently, avoiding having to buy an expensive bag of parts for a single brick. And to its credit, Lego encouraged this. But that's still too hard and limiting for most people (including me), so Lego is now considering how to improve the experience, starting with easier-to-use design software.

I asked Michael McNally, Lego's senior brand-relations manager, whether Lego saw parallels in any other company's of approach to catering to niche market segments and encouraging peer production. Interestingly, he gave Apple's iTunes as an analogy. iTunes lets you download individual songs, not just albums. Although you can't upload your own music to iTunes, there are plenty of companies that can do that for you. And can make your own playlists and share them with other users, which is a bit like a custom Lego creation from standard parts. "What iTunes does for music, Lego Factory is doing for people who like to build," McNally says.

October 04, 2005

The Long Tail of social software

TimeLast week I wrote about Salesforce.com's new AppExchange and the Long Tail of software. Now comes Ning, aiming to help create the Long Tail of social software, which only sounds the same.

What's social software? Well, at risk of getting into another Web 2.0 definitional mess, it's web-based software that builds on communities and peer-produced content. The old examples were social-networking sites like Friendster and LinkedIn, both of which I found annoying and ultimately of little use. The newer examples are far better: Flickr, Craigslist, Bloglines and Wikipedia, for example. They're not just community for the sake of connection; there's actually something to do there.

Ning, which is the fruit of Marc Andreessen's 24 Hour Laundry stealth project, aims to make it easy to create such sites for niche applications. It's designed for projects that are below the level of a business plan and dreams of an IPO. It's meant to bring big-community online tools and features to hypernarrow interests and needs.

Examples include a sermon exchange, a babysitting co-op or a college semester abroad community site. You might do it because you needed it yourself, and--who knows--it might snowball into something more. That's the great thing about community and user-contributed content. Simply providing a catalyst can often be enough.

I haven't had a chance to spend much time with it yet, but right now it reminds me of Joe Kraus's JotSpot, which uses the wiki approach to creating niche hosted applications. That is to say that it looks very capable, but it's too hard to figure out yet. Ning just needs a few more really cool examples to highlight on its front page, and then show people how easy it is copy them and make their own. And some sort of directory of the apps already created.

Right now I'm looking for a Ning site for Bay Area biking routes, and there's really no good way to do it. The search function, which is tag-based, returns nothing I understand. Give them time--I met with Marc and his team while they were in stealth mode, and they're smart and practical. They'll figure it out.

October 01, 2005

Business blogging != executive blogging

Maxhead_1Another example of creeping "headism": Stephen Baker at Business Week warns that "The business blog backlash is nigh".

How long will it be before a parade of CEOs and other top execs turn their backs on blogging with a dismissive 'Been There, Done That?' It's the rare CEO who has the time and energy and openness to blog.

    I fully agree that it's hard to imagine many CEOs keeping up a decent blog for long. Not only do they not have the time, but the natural voice of the boss is fundamentally incompatible with the voice of the blogger, at least as regards their own company affairs (which is why I don't write much about Wired here).

    But it's a huge mistake to equate executive blogs with business blogging, just as it's a huge mistake to see the world only through the economic and culture lens of stars and hits (what I call "headism"). The best business blogs come from the employees, not the bosses. They have more time, and are less prone to marketing gobbledygook and gnomic platitudes. And those kind of blogs are on the rise, not the decline.

[Definitional update: I'm using "business blogs" here the same way Baker did--blogs from within a company that are largely about that company and/or its products. I'm not referring to blogs about business generally. Other terms for this are "corporate blogs" or "company blogs".]

    The most successful business blogs are peer-to-peer: engineers, designers and managers within a company blogging about their own projects for the engineers, designers and other customers outside the company who use those products or care about that project.

    Traditionally corporate messaging is directed up through the management structure within a company until it is released via an executive speech or press release, at which point it is supposed to be picked up by the press, filtered again, and trickled down to the public and ultimately the customers. But now that sort of top-down messaging is losing its effectiveness as consumers vote with their browser to go directly to the unfiltered voice of people like them.

    Simply put, we're starting to trust what executives say less and what employees say more. And if given a choice, as is the case with companies that let their employees blog, we'll take the word of an articulate engineer in the belly of the beast over the double-speak of a press release any day. As institutional credibility declines (from Enron to the White House), individual credibility is taking its place.

    Markets are conversations, not speeches. People want to hear from real people, not remote authority figures. Abstract institutions are turning transparent to reveal communities of regular people. And as that trend continues, consumer attention will shift from the institutional voice of the management to the human voice of their peers in the rank and file.

    In a speech last week at the m-squared marketing conference, I called this the power of "ants with megaphones". What's great about company blogging below the executive level is that it's impedance matched to blogging about the company from outside. Robert Scoble and Dave Weiner debating in public is a conversation of peers. Reading a New York Times account of a Bill Gates speech is not.

    Scoble himself expands on this in a great post that ends on the right note:

So, CEOs, if you don't get blogging, that's OK. It gives guys like me who are seven levels down from the CEO something to do.