This Book Is About You!
"The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson
This book is about you. Simply by virtue of reading this blog, you are part of the Long Tail.
“The Long Tail” was a smash hit and it is easy to see why. This book is an energetic, savvy and perceptive look at the cultural impact of the internet revolution. Specifically, it looks at the explosion of consumer choice that has resulted from web technology. Instead of being constrained by publishers and Hollywood studios to choose from a few, pre-selected “hits”, we are able to access millions of books, songs and videos on Amazon, iTunes and YouTube. Anderson shows convincingly that sales of the “long tail” of non-hits is cumulatively as large and important as sales of the “hits” themselves.
Even more importantly, the rapid advance of technology and instant distribution of the internet has put creative power in the hands of - everyone. Through a website, the blogosphere, self-publishing on Lulu.com, or even recording music and short films, we can create content almost on an equal footing with the professionals. Anderson’s hope is that the radical democratic effect of the internet will allow a profusion of choice, diversity and talent and allow the very best to percolate to the top. He doesn’t promise internet riches for everyone, but instead welcomes the broadening and deepening of our culture that will result.
This may seem a rosy, Californian view of the web’s potential, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Chris Anderson has made his living on the cutting edge of the information revolution, as Editor-in-Chief of San Francisco’s achingly techno-edge “Wired” magazine. This book, full entitled “The Long Tail: How endless choice is creating unlimited demand” was published in 2006 and nominated for the prestigious Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Book Award in that same year. Sadly it lost out to the absorbing and fashionable “When China Shakes the World”. Well, Chinese growth and its commodities boom have cooled for now, but the radical power of the internet really does continue to shake the world (not least the Great British High Street, as the sad demise of several recent chains shows).
The Long Tail is a readable and engaging 232 pages. However its core message can, and is, summarised in just two (P.52-53, for the time poor):
A) In virtually all markets, there are far more niche goods than hits
B) The internet makes it cost effective to offer a massively expanded variety of products
C) Recommendations and rankings can drive demand down the Tail to more obscure products
D) The demand curve flattens eventually, because real niche products sells very few units
E) Together, all the niche products (the “non-hits”) equal a market as large as the “hits”
F) The Long Tail is the REAL shape of consumer demand – unfiltered by production and distribution bottlenecks
Anderson identified three specific forces working in the Long Tail:
1. 1. Democratizing production = Toolmakers, producers (music, video, blogging tools etc).
2. 2. Democratizing distribution = Aggregators (Amazon, iTunes, eBay, Wikipedia)
3. 3. Connecting supply and demand = Filters (Google, Rhapsody, recommendations, best-seller lists)
Aggregators collect a wide variety of goods and make it available to the marketplace. Those who saw the power of the long tail early on are now billionaires, the best example perhaps being Jeff Bezos who in 1994 set up a little online book-selling venture called Amazon. Once it carried more titles than bricks-and-mortar retailers and added peer reviews and customised reading lists, it gained an unassailable competitive advantage. Other visionaries have created information aggregators for love not money – for example, Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia, perhaps the most famous example of successful open source content creation or “crowd-sourcing”.
Filters are especially useful in sifting out the junk. Community websites such as Ciao.uk or Dooyoo.co.uk are a magnificent filter. The consumer-generated content and community style are fantastic for turning what would be an anonymous list of products into an interactive, customer-driven experience. Every time a customer suggests a new product, they are adding to the Long Tail. Every time they pen a review, they are breaking down the traditional marketing models that producers and publishers relied on for decades. Even better, the authors are paid for the privilege!
The relentless optimism of the book can become a little grating, as if the dotcom bubble had never actually burst. The cultural revolution he describes will also take a little longer to arrive in most places compared with the “early adopters” of northern California. His attempts to quantify the size of the “long tail” are also nebulous – the number of long tail sales are equated to the number of hits in one chapter, but compared to the denominator in the 80/20 rule in another.
Still Anderson is persuasive and he grounds his analysis in an analysis of distribution systems and the multiplicity of choice that goes back to the Sears “Wish Book” of 1897, travels through the Borders megastores of the Nineties and ends with the millions of titles in the Amazon used and new listings. Anderson, in the closing chapters of the book, provides further contemporary examples such as Youtube and Salesforce.com and offers some important pointers for anyone considering starting a Long Tail based business. His tag-line: “How to create a consumer paradise”.
This is a detailed, intelligent work which raises a lot of interesting and new questions. You may not agree with every point made, or every example cited, but no-one can deny that “The Long Tail” is a compelling read. It has the ring of truth.
After all, in writing this review, I am simply validating its central argument.
