The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more.
© 2006Chris Anderson, Hyperion, NY,
The theory of the Long Tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.[1]
Collectively, all of this translates into six themes of the Long Tail age:
1. …there are far more niche goods than hits.
2. The cost of reaching those niches is now falling dramatically.
3. …it is now possible to offer a massively expanded variety of products.
4. …the demand curve flattens.
5. …there are so many niche products that collectively they can comprise a market rivaling the hits.
6. …the natural shape of demand is revealed…
Bottom line: A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.[2]
When “the Long Tail” was published in Wired in October 2004, it quickly became the most cited article the magazine had ever run. The three main observations- (1) the tail of available variety is far longer than we realize; (2) it’s now within reach economically; (3) all those niches, when aggregated, can made up a significant market-seemed indisputable, especially backed up with heretofore unseen data.[3]
Hit-driven economics, which [the author will] discuss in more depth in later chapters, is a creation of an age in which there just wasn’t enough room to carry everything for everybody; not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and video games produced; not enough screens to show all the available movies; not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs; not enough radio waves to play all the music created; and nowhere near enough hours in the day to squeeze everything through any of these slots.
This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. The differences are profound.[5]
Down in the tail, where distribution and productions cost are low (thanks to the democratizing power of digital technologies), business considerations are often secondary. Instead, people create for a variety of other reasons-expression, fun, experimentation, and so on. The reason one might call it an economy at all is that there is a coin of the realm that can be every bit as motivating as money: reputation. Measured by the amount of attention a product attracts, reputation can be converted into other things of value: jobs, tenure, audiences and lucrative offers of all sorts.
Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, calls this the “exposure culture.” Using blogs as an example, he writes,
The exposure culture reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything. Web authors link to each other, quote liberally, and sometimes annotate entire articles. E-mailing links to favorite articles and jokes has become as much a part of American work culture as the water cooler. The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but instead, failure to properly attribute authorship. And at the center of this exposure culture is the almighty search engine. If your site is easy to find on Google, you don’t sue-you celebrate.[6]
For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is. The new tastemakers are us. Word of mouth is now a public conversation, carried in blog comments and customer reviews, exhaustively collated and measured. The ants have megaphones.[7]
Amplified word of mouth is the manifestation of the third force of the Long Tail: tapping consumer sentiment to connect supply to demand. The first force, democratizing production, populates the Tail. The second force, democratizing distribution, makes it all available.
But those two are not enough. It is not until this third force, which helps people find what they want in this new superabundance of variety, kicks in that the potential of the Long Tail marketplace is truly unleashed.[8]
So bottom line: Human attention is more expandable than money. The primary effect of the Long Tails is to shift our taste toward niches, but to the extent we’re more satisfied by what we’re finding, we may well consume more of it. We just won’t necessarily pay a lot more for the privilege.[9]
No comments:
Post a Comment