The Long Tail and blogging
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.
Bad Language / Who are all these bloggers anyway? And who reads them? wrote:
[...] There is long tail of blogs and they’re not like the top 100 blogs many of us read so avidly. In fact most of them are about cats. (I made that bit up but it could be true.) [...]
Posted on 20-Jul-06 at 7:19 am | Permalink
Bad Language / Web 2.0 week - Tim O’Reilly ‘interview’ wrote:
[...] Another front in the data wars is around online file sharing. While the music and movie industries are gradually seeking accomodation with purveyors of file sharing technology, and I believe that there will ultimately be a rich marketplace of paid content, there’s no question but that the ease of digital copying challenges the business models of content industries based on scarcity. Instead, there is a new calculus in which the benefits of viral distribution compete in the bookkeeper’s mind with the value of restricted access. In 2002, I wrote an essay entitled “Piracy is Progressive Taxation,” in which I argued that for most creative works, obscurity is a greater danger than piracy, and if piracy brings greater visibility to what Chris Anderson later called the Long Tail [See the Bad Language post on The Long Tail], it will be worth some dimunition in the revenues accruing to the top artists. And as Chris has so compellingly argued, the benefits of unlimited access to obscure long tail content has driven the success of new media giants, from Netflix and Amazon to Google. [...]
Posted on 06-Dec-06 at 9:56 am | Permalink
Bad Language / To free or not free, that is the question wrote:
[...] My old chum John McGarvey just did an interview with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired and author of The Long Tail. (See my old post about The Long Tail and blogging.) [...]
Posted on 07-Jan-08 at 4:06 pm | Permalink