Is the Long Tail wagging the dog?

I’m reading (ok, a year late I hear you scream) Chris Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’. The kind of book you know will be important to you but don’t quite know why.

To summarise: the internet revolutionises content production, content distribution and the way searchers are connected with that content. The result is that the totality of ‘niche’ markets (previously commercially unviable) is now greater than the mainstream markets. In short, if you’re Amazon, you’ll soon be making more money selling fewer units of an infinitely larger range of things - driven by the following 3 forces:

• Democratise production • Democratise distribution • Connect supply and demand

The sensible internet entrepreneur will be writing software tools for bloggers, podcasters, designers and musicians to produce more content. Or he’ll be developing new and better aggregators (like iTunes or Amazon) to bring more content together. Or she’ll be developing search algorithms, systems for recommendation, social media platforms and viral systems to bring consumers to that content.

But what she won’t be doing is actually creating content - unless she can create a huge volume of it.

The ‘Long Tail’ needs content but for the individual producer, content production isn’t profitable. So where does most of the content that fuels software development, aggregator design and search engine profitability come from? Paradoxically, from people striving for the kind of media superstardom and success that characterised the old model.

And the best way to stimulate that production? By continuing to sell a myth of ‘consumer-as-producer’ to a generation striving for media superstardom - a myth so powerful and seductive that Anderson himself uses it without even noticing the inherent contradiction in the sentence.

December 28, 2007 | Filed Under business insight 

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