John Cassidy reviews “The Long Tail,” a book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, in The New Yorker this week. As is the way with New Yorker book reviews, it reviews the topic more than the book. (Full disclosure: I write for Wired from time to time.)
The theme of Anderson’s book is that the internet allows businesses like eBay, Amazon and Netflix to make money from ‘the long tail’ of niche products that regular shops can’t afford to stock.
The review makes two criticisms:
- The long tail doesn’t negate the value of hype and hits. Just consider the Da Vinci Code – bad but popular. (See my post: Why is the Da Vinci Code so popular?)
- Nor does it stop companies like eBay, Amazon and Netflix becoming oligopolies. The customer may have choice in product but not so much in supplier.
There’s a similar phenomenon with blogs. The internet means that a four-month-old blog post is easier to find than a four-month-old print magazine article. But that doesn’t stop the top 100 blogs getting much more attention than the rest nor does it mean that people read the old stuff on blogs.
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