If you’ve ever thought of releasing that guqin dance music album, producing dental floss in exciting new flavours or putting your collection of airline teaspoons up on eBay, The Long Tail offered hope for all.
Chris Anderson’s 2005 Wired article The Long Tail has been discussed, re-discussed, interpreted, re-interpreted and badly interpreted since it debuted.
It’s a demand curve that “imagines” a world with infinite supply and informed and easy access. What makes it so relevant is that the Internet offers up some relevant real world examples. The curve reveals the way the Internet is changing the way people are accessing/consuming books, music, movies and DVDs.
Unlike the stores in your neighbourhood, Amazon, Netflix and iTunes don’t actually hold physical stock taking up valuable retail space, so they can offer up thousands and thousands and thousands of titles, and whether they sell one or a million of any given item, they make a profit. It’s all cream to them.
The crux of the theory is this:
“In a market with near infinite supply (huge variety of products), a demand will exist for even the most obscure products.”
The Ski Slope
Chris Anderson looked at a variety of online businesses, asking questions like “what percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online store (iTunes/Amazon) will rent or sell at least once a month?”. The answer? Not 80/20 as you might imagine, but 99%.
You’ll probably have seen his ski-slope shaped Long Tail curve. It’s a graceful hyperbolic curve that looks something like this:
There are blockbusters up one end, a kind of sweet spot of popular niche interests in the middle and it tails off (assumably forever) to an infinite market of boffins, otaku, fetishists, collectors and academic researchers. For anything that’s produced there’s probably someone, somewhere that wants it.
What really got everyone excited was the maths. The products in the tail earn the company money, and successful examples suggest that the tail end, when you tote it up, could even surpass the sales of the hits. Ka ching!
The Bungee Jump
Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School has done the research and she doesn’t agree. Her research shows that basically we all like blockbusters. We’re not very adventurous. There’s a long tail alright, but it’s long and flat and looks more like this:
Part of her research was iTunes, which had 4 million digital songs for sale in 2007. Of those, 91% sold less than 100 copies each (and 24% sold only one copy). The curve is much more like a cliff.
With Australian online movie rental company Quickflix she had rich data to work with, including profiles of customers, buying history and reviews that they posted. As you’d expect, the bulk of customers just want a good blockbuster, but she was able to segment a small number of customers who were “movie buffs”. What she found was that even they rented 34% of their titles from the blockbusters and only 8% came from the more obscure end of the tail. They were critical, picky and not motivated by “obscurity” in their habits. Basically they just wanted good films, and there are often logical reasons why popular things (in the head of the curve) are popular and unpopular things (in the tail) are unpopular.
Creativity At The Bottom Of The Curve
When The Long Tail first dominated talk around the water cooler it all seemed like pretty good news, but the reality is that there’s a bit of a switch in focus as you move down the curve. At the head or the niche marketing sweet-spot midway (what Kevin Kelly calls 1000 True Fans) a creator can make a living, but the model switches to talking about aggregators (like iTunes or Amazon) making money in the tail end. With rare exceptions, an artist is likely to starve to death at that end of the curve. The reality is nicely explained by ambient music artist Robert Rich, who says:
“The sort of artist who survives at the long tail is the sort who would be happy doing nothing else, who willingly sacrifices security and comfort for the chance to communicate something meaningful, hoping to catch the attention of those few in the world who seek what they also find meaningful. It’s a somewhat solitary existence, a bit like a lighthouse keeper throwing a beam out into the darkness, in faith that this action might help someone unseen.”
No matter what shape you think The Long Tail is, as Abe Burmeister pointed out in 2006, it’s a tail of inequality:
” One can see foreshadowing of this effect in Chris Anderson’s writing, for all his hyping of the long tail he sees far more concerned with creating the structures and situations in which long tails can occur than he is concerned with what things might actually be like inside those long tails. The owners of the MySpaces and Flickrs and the producers of video editing softwares are getting rich by enabling an unprecedented amount of people to make and distribute their own ‘content’. And way off at the edge of these systems are a few alpha users who also may be getting rich, or at least famous to their peers by making some of that content. They aren’t in the long tail though, they are in privileged head. Those in the tail might have a little fun, but they get neither the audience nor financial rewards that demarcate success in this 21st century culture.”
This is true of Anderson’s curve, but almost a dire emergency if Elberse’s bungee jump is accurate. Her curve allows for haves and have-nots, success or failure, make-it or break-it. Of course we all measure success differently, and some people don’t need to make a living from their creative endeavours, but her research suggests that the artistic freedom that The Long Tail seemed to offer could be more myth than real for many people.
Pic: Mazzy by creativespark
1 Comment
August 6, 2008 at 2:53 pm
At last … someone has made the long tail theory clear.
Lovely writing.
Liz