17 ms·

Where did the long tail go?

• ghaff 4y ago
  >It pains me to say this—because the Long Tail was sold to us as an economic law that not only predicted a more inclusive era of prosperity, but would especially help creative people. My recollection is that Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" never particularly promoted prosperity for those in the long tail but rather for the aggregators of the long tail. And that seems to have happened to a large degree. Here's part of the blurb for Anderson's book: Wired editor Anderson declares the death of "common culture"—and insists that it's for the best. Why don't we all watch the same TV shows, like we used to? Because not long ago, "we had fewer alternatives to compete for our screen attention," he writes. Smash hits have existed largely because of scarcity: with a finite number of bookstore shelves and theaters and Wal-Mart CD racks, "it's only sensible to fill them with the titles that will sell best." Today, Web sites and online retailers offer seemingly infinite inventory, and the result is the "shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards." These "countless niches" are market opportunities for those who cast a wide net and de-emphasize the search for blockbusters. That actually seems pretty accurate. Amazon and YouTube have done just fine by the long tail. And the variety of streaming services have pretty much fractured primetime network viewing and Top 40 radio. Power laws are still in effect and small-time artists are often doing even worse financially than they used to, and even some of the aggregators (e.g. Netflix) have their own struggles.
  • incrudible 4y ago
    Even if Amazon was profitable selling goods (it is not), its approach is to let marketplace sellers figure out which products sell well, then it starts sells those items itself. Amazon is chasing the short tail. Streaming services are fractured, but individually almost all of their revenue comes from blockbusters. Attempts at original content are killed quickly when they fail to deliver bigly. Netflix is particularly guilty of this. The prediction in the book does not pan out. Today more than ever, the money goes to the top.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      There is a long tail and consumers get a lot of value from that long tail. But I don't wholly disagree that--in addition to the creators in the long tail not making much--the aggregators can make relatively little from it either compared to the blockbusters on the left hand side of the curve. So I think the observation that a long tail exists was absolutely correct but the claim of financial value from it is a mixed bag. (Anderson was also largely incorrect in his claims about the end of theory. https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ )
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > even some of the aggregators (e.g. Netflix) have their own struggles. Netflix’s stock price is still pretty high considering their product. Disney market cap is $180B, Comcast is $180B, Netflix is $85B, Warner Bros Discovery is $35B. Fox/Viacom/Paramount are in the $15B to $20B range. Everyone else is much smaller. Disney and Comcast have other businesses than selling media, and Disney has particularly strong brands. Netflix’s content does not seem much more compelling than HBO’s (Warner Bros Discovery), but it does have global presence.
    • Retric 4y ago
      Netflix might be overvalued, but those other companies aren’t in great places. Disney for example is in a tough place in terms of growth which really hurts their market cap. Take say their parks, they can’t significantly expand, open up new locations, or significantly raise prices and those parks have the risk of another shutdown etc. ESPN similarly dominates their niche but as a middle man they could lose major contracts. Again profitable but not a lot of room for growth. Disney+ is what their 3rd streaming service and eats into existing profits. Why buy an MCU blue-ray when 3 months of streaming costs the same. They executed their purchases of Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars reasonably well but audiences are getting saturated and there isn’t a lot of franchises like that to keep buying. Worse they can’t seem to get new franchises off the ground. Frozen for example was a big hit but they ran it and other promising IP into the ground.
      • lotsofpulp 4y ago
        I agree, I do not know if any media sellers have sufficiently high and resilient cash flow to be worth $100B+, or even close to it. Well, except Apple and Amazon, but that is not because of the media.
      • samatman 4y ago
        Objectively they've bungled Star Wars, it remains to be seen if they can get out of the woods with the amount of hostility they've created. Without the Mandalorian the situation would be dire. Pixar literally didn't miss for the entire independent era, the occasional lackluster movie isn't going to alienate their core demographic, which is parents. Marvel is of course printing money with no end in sight, but this is a two out of three thing imho.
  • mattmanser 4y ago
    He actually explicitly mentions Amazon and Netflix as counter examples of what you've said. Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable, they have been saved by aws Netflix - has cut the number of movies on offer dramatically, cutting out the long tail, and adopted a strategy of chasing blockbuster TV shows It's worth reading the whole article, it is pretty good. As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      Of course things are much more fractured than they used to be. The audience for Stranger Things or GoT is minuscule compared to something like "Must See TV" on NBC Thursdays in the past. I think you might be surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of Stranger Things and certainly haven't watched. It's fair that Netflix doesn't really carry long tail content--never did carry the longest tail stuff and now that content owners want more money in general and there's a lot more competition for subscribers it doesn't make sense to pay for back catalog stuff that others own. YouTube and TikTok are better examples. It seems obvious that there is a long tail. But neither Anderson or most anyone else claimed that being in the long tail was a path to riches. And while I'm not sure it's valid to write off Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, etc., it's probably fair to say that the long tail has mostly not been a pile of gold for the aggregators either. But it does exist.
      • jamiek88 4y ago
        The long long tail of tv is now the likes of PlutoTV and Tubi etc. free streaming with channels dedicated to for example, the Beverley hillbillies !
    • sitkack 4y ago
      > claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable If this is true, then isn't the retail side effectively removing all the oxygen from the ecosystem? This sounds massively stagnating, the combination of not-profitable and extremely efficient.
  • mr_tristan 4y ago
    > My recollection is that Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" never particularly promoted prosperity for those in the long tail but rather for the aggregators of the long tail. And that seems to have happened to a large degree. This was exactly my understanding as well, but, some personal anecdotes also bring up some interesting questions. The people on the long tail that I've seen be successful often just do things a bit differently, so I'm not entirely sure how you could easily measure success. Creators I know of use the aggregator platforms like a marketing tool, and sell "other things". So, for a couple of working musicians I know, no more CDs or any real money distributing music, you sell schwag, live concert revenue, etc. Woodworker's I've followed seem to embrace teaching and use a combination of schwag, recommended tools, educational tools, etc. in addition to the occasional custom piece of furniture. The successful ones do seem to follow the "true fans model", where they basically try to "live in their niche" out on the tail, and regularly connect with people. But I'm not sure the long tail examples that are succeeding, are the "future of business". Really, they're just people who've done the math and figured out how to keep a small business afloat. But this money is a drop in the pond now compared to the platforms itself. These aggregation platforms are basically becoming the gatekeepers and central banks of their marketplaces. And at least the way I've seen the long tail theory presented, they never really talk about the potential central gatekeeping aspect. It's always a happy "gee, we'll be really diverse and stuff", but never, "at the cost of fewer places to access a lot of these goods".
• mindvirus 4y ago
  I hear what the author is trying to say, and I might be missing the point, but it seems counter to what I've seen. In agreement that it's important though. Blockbuster movies by definition aren't the long tail. There are tons of examples of it: - music, as the author points out. Kpop popularity in the west is probably a big example, but also artists getting famous on SoundCloud. - video games are another place where there are a ton of indie studios doing their thing. The other day there was a post about Zachtronics. - Books, we've seen several self publishing success stories on Kindle and others. Amazon claims more and more people are making over $50K on KDP. - products, we see tons of success on Kickstarter and similar places. Pebble or Remarkable are two examples that come to mind. My take, maybe counter to the author, is that the long tail is there but it's huge, but any individual thing - product, game, etc - seems small, unless it's a hit in which case it's not the tail anymore.
  • olalonde 4y ago
    To add to your examples, there are now a bunch of independent content creators making a living from platforms like YouTube, Twitch, OnlyFans, etc.
  • XCSme 4y ago
    I feel the same: the long tail is there but it's too long, so it becomes very thin. There are A LOT more content creatores today than 10 or 20 years ago.
    • api 4y ago
      This is the reality. The tail is much longer and thinner. I get the feeling that the author is mourning the great late 20th century counterculture movements. They are worth missing as they did produce a ton of creativity, but the thing is that there were never many of them. There were maybe a dozen tops: hippies, hip hop, goth, rave, punk, a few smaller or shorter lived ones. Today there are thousands. There is no identifiable counterculture because there are too many to count and they are always popping up and dying off. I guess you could say there is one counterculture and it’s the long tail itself. As usual William Gibson, the single most prophetic sci-fi writer, got the feel of it (but not the specifics): “Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.” - William Gibson, Neuromancer There’s a dozen more quotes like that. That’s the first one that came to mind.
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  This is largely why I don't watch movies, TV or listen to new music anymore. Everything seems either lazily targeted to some large group of viewers, and the rest of production doesn't matter anymore. I'm not even sure some of the creators of these things know why people would like the paints their algorithms are telling them to paint in the numbered areas.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    This takeaway is pretty much the exact opposite of what’s going on. The algorithmic content chases mass appeal and large demographics. The long tail is niche independent artists doing their own thing and is, for them, commercially really small.
    • mola 4y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. The short circuit between production and feedback (YouTube studio analytics, etc) are causing a lot of the small creators to optimize for whatever fluke that got them famous, and then replicate it again and again and again. It feels like what happened is that the tools the big shots were using (test audiences etc) were democratized and now most of the long tail is playing the same game. Optimizing for some (local) lowest common denominator and treating their creations as a commodities and not as art.
• iandanforth 4y ago
  I regularly watch economically prosperous content on youtube that would have had zero chance of distribution 10 years ago. I also watch available but not prosperous content that would never have left people's imaginations or living-rooms. I have access to a wealth and variety of content today that I didn't imagine when I was in college. The long tail is alive and well and the OP is incorrect.
  • uwuemu 4y ago
    Just look at platforms like Patreon, Subscribestar, Twitch, Onlyfans etc. (these days also Youtube with members and superchats). Hell, ironically enough (given the OP), even substack. These are the places where having just 500-1000 supporters can set you up for a VERY comfortable living, and mostly with no need for advertisement driven business (if you don't want to). That's where the long tail is and it's healthier than ever before.
    • rob74 4y ago
      Also, niche acts on Spotify, Bandcamp etc. - they can now theoretically reach much larger audiences. Of course, the downside is that there are also a lot of other acts to compete with, so the odds of "breaking out" of the long tail are not really good. And I'm not sure how much artists with 10 to 30 000 "monthly listeners" earn on Spotify. Probably not enough to make a living...
      • ghaff 4y ago
        So, if every 30,000 monthly listener on Spotify listens to 10 songs on average they'll earn about $1300 per month by my calculation. Of course, playing weekend gigs at your local bar or college party didn't earn you a living either.
        • galaxyLogic 4y ago
          In NYC a typical bar-band gets one free bear per player, sometimes not even that.
• pnf 4y ago
  Mainstream culture is going to be dominated by consolidated media companies until we go back to decentralized, disconnected medieval village life. (Whether that's desirable or whether the path there is survivable is another question.) But when have there been more subcultures in the past decades than now? It's just that they are so niche as to be boring to almost everyone not into them. But for the chosen few, there will often be a commercial element to their interest that is sustaining the "creators". Maybe not to the middle class lifestyle as the author laments. But what does that even mean anymore? Still, there are many people living independently, supported by their small audiences. That is new.
• quadhome 4y ago
  What if the Long Tail was effectively creative venture capitalism in the era of cheap money? Does that mean media and culture re-centralise in a recession? The author makes predicts that Spotify will follow other aggregators and reduce its catalogue to blockbusters. We’ll see!
• kqr 4y ago
  There's another side of the long tail (power law) coin: the head becomes much more popular. Both extremes become more extreme, at the expense of the shoulders. This seems like what we see: places like YouTube allows small producers to be viable with small audiences -- on the other side, things like Netflix pushes generic content that you can pretty much assume everyone with Netflix has seen.
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The author makes two points: 1. The vast majority of the money is made by blockbusters. 2. Producers outside of blockbusters aren't making a living. 1 is true but misleading. Anecdotally, I believe 2 is wrong. "The Long Tail" doesn't disagree with point #1. The fat head is where the most of the money is. That's not new or controversial. IIRC, the Long Tail says that it's now possible to exploit the long tail. It's still the tail, though. You're not going to be making rock star money, but at least you can now put food on your table. I know several musicians who pawned their instruments in the 90s to be able to eat. The musicians I know in the 2020s certainly aren't thriving, but they're not pawning instruments. And #2 is just plain wrong. Tons of niche content creators have turned professional in the last few years. They're not making rock star cash, but they've quit their day job. The ones who are coming closest to rock star cash are the video producers. This used to be a brutal field. You'd need to scrape together 7 figures to make a movie, do the indie field circuit, et cetera. Now all you need is an iPhone and a YouTube or TikTok account, perhaps combined with Patreon. Netflix isn't where you find the long tail, YouTube and TikTok are. And now there are YouTube channels much more professional than your local TV stations. For music, 99% of musicians used to make their living teaching, and they still do. The money they get sporadically playing in small venues is just bonus money. But they all have Patreon's now too. It's not enough to let them stop teaching, but the regular income makes a huge difference compared to the very irregular income from gigs. AFAICT writers have always had a long tail. If you could sell a few thousand books, you could find a publisher. You wouldn't get any promotion or shelf space at that volume nor enough money to quit your day job, but... These days there are tons of writers who have quit their day job and subsist on web fiction + Patreon + Kindle Unlimited.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    It's an interesting question what the long tail looks like financially for individual creators both in absolute numbers and on a percentage basis relative to 25 years ago. I suspect in absolute numbers there is more money going to long tail creators just because there is so much more opportunity to reach a non-geographically-bound audience. On the other hand, the barriers to entry have essentially collapsed in many cases which has, among other things, led to a veritable flood of content--and many of the often fairly casual creators don't even have a particular interest in, at least directly, monetizing. If you're a long tail would be professional, you have more channels to a potentially paying audience today that doesn't necessarily involve getting picked by a gatekeeper. But you're also now competing with a huge number of enthusiastic amateurs, who don't care about the money, who would never have bothered if they had to get through a gatekeeper.
• raverbashing 4y ago
  The long tails are there, but it requires effort. If you consume content passively (major news, fb front page, reddit etc) you only get the crap generalized (and now polarizing) opinions. But the more niche stuff is not on the frontpage. It's not all cheap takes and funny memes. It's like food. You can get the fast food crap for cheap or either you pay with money or time for something better
• soneca 4y ago
  > ” I’m merely claiming that they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in modern history. To operate on the fringe is almost akin to wearing an invisibility cloak from one of those Harry Potter stories.” Despite this being the central claim of the article, the author doesn’t make any effort to defend, explain, or even list examples of that claim. They state it as a fact. And I disagree with that central foundation, so the article is kind of useless to me. I learned nothing from it. I still think the long tail of creators and artists have more influence in the society than they had in the 2000s and before. The article is a long effort to brag that the author was right about something a long time ago. But, without the premise above, I think they are wrong. The blockbuster being dead prediction was grossly wrong, but that along doesn’t support the claim above. Neither noticing that Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify earn more money from the big things. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the small creator earns less money. The article also ignore about small creators earning money and reach from Substack, Patreon, Kickstarter, Twitch, YouTube, etc.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    >I still think the long tail of creators and artists have more influence in the society than they had in the 2000s and before. Yes, even if discovery of things in the long tail, much less creators profiting from it, is difficult, it's hard to accept the claim that it's more fringe today than it was 25 years ago when it might not have been created at all or would only have been shared with a small, local audience.
• aaron695 4y ago
  Most of the early internet pop culture ideas were very wrong. They had zero grounding in the reality around them. The subculture of saying the Internet is what they wanted it to be was what everyone worshipped. Clay and Cory and co. Dreams like the Semantic web and "The Internet Perceives Censorship as Damage and Routes Around It" Long tail being wrong is an interesting call. I'd say probably correct. It went mid tail. I have a "Birds aren't real tshirt" (I couldn't get a Red Dwarf t-shirt pre internet) but zero t-shirts of local businesses. Don't care about bands down the road anymore but listen to African hackers songs about 411. This topic needs more thought. It still might go from mid to long tail.
  • njharman 4y ago
    > "The Internet Perceives Censorship as Damage and Routes Around It" That's true and actually happened. What was (and still is) naïve is people believe technology some how trumps "power". That those in power won't use their power to remain in power. "Power perceives challenge to that power as damage and routes around it" E.g. abuse copyright to silence, manipulate public outrage to force social media to censor themselves, to enact "blue checkmarks" and "trusted news sources", to clear cut our rights in the name of "protecting" us from pedophiles or terrorism.
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    419?
    • aaron695 4y ago
• ggambetta 4y ago
  Hasn't this become true to some extent, though? We have a nontrivial amount of people making a living off their YouTube channel, or their Twitch streams, or their Patreon patrons, or Kickstarter, that didn't have access to a global audience 10 or 20 years ago. Even I had moderate success developing videogames in the early 2000s that were definitely part of the long tail; my CG book and my multiplayer articles have found a global if very niche audience. Some of my other projects, like the novel or the movie, haven't, but it's more about their quality and my marketing skills than about not having access.
• toss1 4y ago
  My first thought on reading the title was: "It (the long tail ) is obscured/starved by search engines optimizing for the generic,not the peculiar thing I/we are looking for " And there it is: >>Web platforms aren’t really focused on serving users—what they really want to do is control users. This almost always requires them to squeeze out niche and alternative views, and force as many customers as possible to follow the herd. >>That’s a useful comparison. Web platforms are herders. And, if you follow the analogy, that makes us all sheep. It definitely seems harder to find specific information than it was a few years ago. How can we get search engines to surface the really obscure information gems? I also wonder -if only ~20% of the people are responsible for almost all of the sales ,what are the other 80% doing ? Seems there should be some fat sales tails to be found in that area. It's almost as if the relentless MBA approach of seeking 'blockbusters' and cutting 'losers' just reaches a local maxima, which although very big, is actually suboptimal. What am I missing here?
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Netflix and Disney are the head. TikTok and YouTube are the tail. The head may be bigger, but the tail is certainly thriving.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Large for-profit corporations are never going to be that interested in providing anything other than a relatively small range of products and services, because that's the most profitable approach. If everyone drinks Coke, you can build a Coke factory, develop economies of scale, and make large profits. If everyone has their own unique beverage with no preservatives that has a short shelf life, this doesn't scale, as now you need hundreds of separate production lines for each unique beverage. This also creates a desire for a homogenous population that can be easily marketed to, and ideally a rather dumbed-down population that can be herded like cats by AI recommendation algorithms into the appropriate boxes where their buying habits can be essentially dictated to them (along with their political opinions, ahem). Meet the brainwashed zombies of mass consumption... You really have to deliberately choose to not participate in this, but if you turn your back on it, you can still find lots of interesting niches outside of the Amazon-Netflix-Spotify zone - but nobody's getting rich out on the fringes, because margins are thin and there's no economies of scale to exploit.
• crmd 4y ago
  The long tail would be lucrative to middle class artists if my monthly $9.99 (minus Spotify’s profit) was divided evenly amongst the tracks I streamed last month. But that is not how it works. Instead, those artists get fractions of a penny so Spotify can do 8-10 figure business development deals with top 20 artists and their labels in order to get the blockbuster content.
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  For a compare and contrast, look at Adam Savage's career. Mythbusters was the rare example of a niche product that managed to break through to mainstream success. It was the exception that proves the rule. It stood out because there was very little like it. These days you can't find anything like Mythbusters on mainstream TV. But you can find thousands of similar channels on YouTube. As consumers we're much better off today. And as a producer, Savage's reach is far smaller than it was 10-20 years ago. Yet I bet he's making more money off Patreon and his YouTube channel than he did off Mythbusters. The author is complaining that theatres don't play tail content any more. That's because tail content is so successful they have their own channels now, they don't depend on mainstream distribution. Nobody looking for niche content is looking in theatres, they're looking on YouTube or TikTok.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    And of course the competition from those platforms--as well as other streaming platforms--means that there are a lot fewer art house or back catalog theatres than there used to be. So what "long tail" theatres did exist, mostly in large cities, mostly don't any longer which means theatres are more about blockbuster content than ever.
• fullshark 4y ago
  The long tail has never been stronger, the paradox is the head has also never been stronger in terms of attracting advertising dollars + cultural head space BECAUSE the long tail has never been stronger. Basically NFL/NBA and Disney properties are the only things with massive cultural foot prints anymore, and are more valuable for that reason (see: the movie investment portion of the piece). So many conversations now with my friends about pop culture and we'll mention TV shows, music, games, books, or movies we're consuming, and none of us have even heard of what we're talking about. That wasn't the case 20 years ago and cultural fragmentation will just continue. The author is basically lamenting how long tail properties used to have larger cultural footprints in part because there were so few of them. So the long tail has never been larger or more important, but each individual member of the long tail is growing weaker as the tail is growing in size.
  • mumblemumble 4y ago
    If we agree that aggregators of the long tail are getting stronger, then I'd argue that the long tail is also getting stronger. But the medium tail might be having a hard time of it. Take the trajectory of my video consumption. I've never been super big on mainstream culture, for whatever reason. So, with some notable examples, I tend not to consume much in the way of blockbuster movies or prime time TV. 25 years ago, what that meant was that I was watching David Lynch movies and the like. Nowadays, no studios are funding that kind of work. But I've also moved further out on the tail. I'm not even sure the tail went this far back when the term "long tail" was coined. My favorite film I've seen so far this year was a documentary that I don't think would ever have made it on to the distribution networks that existed in the late 1990s. (Maybe a film festival I couldn't have afforded to attend.) But I was able to find it on Apple TV. And we can go even further out if we look at YouTube and Vimeo. I don't know that something like Motorsport Gigantoraptor or Супер Сус would have even been possible a quarter century ago.
  • lucas_membrane 4y ago
    Disney -- They acquired the rights to Rocky and Bullwinkle (and Betty Boop, too, IIRC) simply to eliminate competition from the long tail.
• jrmg 4y ago
  The irony of writing an article about the long tail being a myth on a niche substack blog…
  • microtherion 4y ago
    A blog where literally the next article is "50 Essential African Albums (Part 3 of 3)", as I pointed out to the author.
• sumy23 4y ago
  Does anyone else hate the long tail? Most of the content I consume comes from the long tail. The content itself is interesting and great. I love it. However, consuming long tail content feels like another step along the path towards social isolation. Like I can never talk about or share the things I enjoy with others because the chance of them also having enjoyed these things is near-0. And of course, you can recommend your long tail content to others, but everyone is always recommending long tail content to each other. It's a bit much to keep up with. I feel somewhat envious of the days when, for instance, everyone in the country listened to The White Album or Dark Side of the Moon and could enjoy it together.
  • lmm 4y ago
    Yep. There's definitely some value in having a shared cultural context, and we're losing that.
• Cupertino95014 4y ago
  There IS a guy who claims to make $5,000 a month writing about really boring topics. He picks the most boring thing you can think of, writes the definitive research about it, and voila. There are enough people who find his writing interesting, and the topic unusual enough, that the Long Tail is working for him. But Ted is right: Long Tail producers have always had a tough time, and whatever opportunities there are now are even harder to find. Old ones, like being the Swing Dance King of Pittsburgh (I made that up, so don't come at me) don't pay like they used to.
• dixego 4y ago
  Some people have already mentioned several problems with the article, but there's a thing that's not really discussed that I'd like to know more about: how many of the people on the "creation" side of the Long Tail i.e. the movie makers, the musicians, the writers, are actually making a living out of finding their own small niche? I have to imagine there can't be that many.
  • rossdavidh 4y ago
    I think the crux of the matter is, how many creators were making a living before? Also not that many. We're comparing one business model that was broken (for the vast majority of creators) to another that is also broken. It seems abundantly clear to me that there are way more TV shows and music acts with global audience than there were before. This doesn't mean they make a decent living.
• Apocryphon 4y ago
  One thing absent from this discussion is all of these platforms- Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, can choose to foster the long tail or not. Meaning, they are so vast and full of content that they must internally promote their content via internal ads, product spotlights, deals, and the almighty algorithm. So perhaps that’s worth examining. These aren’t neutral marketplaces. They can actively promote the short tail blockbuster content, or reach into the long tail and highlight obscure choices.
• lumost 4y ago
  The challenge is that any mechanism to pay for failures is quickly disappearing for the knowledge economy. If you have an unpredictable hit/win rate, the historically best strategy was to bulk up more hits/wins into a larger entity with predictable returns. Many business models today either capitalize on the transaction volume ala app stores or focus on lock in via branding like the MCU. If you make an OK movie or app these days the value is effectively 0.
• mch82 4y ago
  Edit: I’ve double checked & I was thinking of “Free” (2009), not “Long Tail” (2006). Thank you Ghaff for pointing that out. “Free” is based on the idea of selling by products or unedited work at lower prices and moving up market. My comment below gives an example of “Free” applied to video games.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    As Anderson also wrote about in Free there are also a lot of "free" business models where you give away the blog posts, ebook, etc. as essentially promotion for something else--like your time as a consultant or even just your status as an employee.
    • mch82 4y ago
      Yes, and you’ve made me wonder if I may be mixing up bit of Free and Long Tail. I’ve read and recommend both.
  • mch82 4y ago
    Here’s what a Long Tail business model looks like in video games: Start working on an indie game. Along the way, record Unity tutorials to begin building an audience. Post some texture packs to the Unity asset store, then some level packs, then some rigged and animated characters. Share some footage of test gameplay. Start getting audience feedback and fans. Release plot notes on the web. Maybe turn some of that into books (Infinity Blade) on Kindle & iPad, where the cost to publish is zero. Release the full base game as an open beta, but charge for it. Release the final base game at a low price or as free to play. Charge for DLC (Civ VI, StarLink) or skins (Rocket League, Fortnite), or a single player campaign (Halo). Twitch stream your gameplay. Once your graphics are awesome, make a movie (Final Fantasy).
    • pixelbro 4y ago
      Why are none of the examples you mention remotely close to being indie games? Those are clearly not what a Long Tail business model looks like in video games. That Infinity Blade novella was written by Brandon Sanderson.
• seydor 4y ago
  The long tail is always temporary - a cambrian explosion followed by a bottleneck that picks the winners, and the next cycle begins
• ouid 4y ago
  My crotchety take on this is that basically anything worth consuming has remained that way excelusively by not being profitable.
• hamiltonians 4y ago
  same for: 10,000 hours grit/growth mindset 1000 true fans
• mcv 4y ago
  The observation that big business will be most interested in serving big numbers of mainstream customers with cookie-cutter blockbusters sounds trivially obvious to me. The issue with the Web isn't that it makes big business more interested in serving niche interests, it's that it's somewhat easier for niche publishers to compete with them. And sometimes even on big business infrastructure! Writers self-publishing their e-books on Amazon, bands and other small content-creators reaching fans on YouTube. There's lots of that, and it's great, but it's never going to sell as big as the mainstream, because if it did, it would be the mainstream. Didn't Justin Bieber start out on YouTube too?
  • tgflynn 4y ago
    Yes, there seems to be a bait and switch going on in this article. You can't conclude that the "long tail" is dying because big business isn't investing in it. The real questions we should be asking are is the content being produced and are those who produce it able to make a living. It's harder to be sure about the second question but from what I've seen the answer to the first question is definitely yes. I have yet to find an interest so obscure that you can't find multiple high quality YouTube channels covering it. Want to listen to a recitation of the Iliad in Homeric Greek ? It's there. Want to watch a 2 hour video on configuring emacs ? You're covered.
• cudgy 4y ago
  “Not only has Netflix sharply reduced the number of movies it offers on its streaming platform, but now has a lot of competitors (Disney, Apple, Paramount, etc.) that are also tightly managing the titles they feature.” Doesn’t this explain why much of Netflix content has been removed. Owners of that content removing it from Netflix to feature it on their new streaming networks? The content is still available just not through a single massive aggregator like Netflix was in the past.
• tharne 4y ago
  Fear not, the long tail is alive and well. It's just not where the author is looking for it. This has to do with the flippening that has taken place in recent history and has not been widely acknowledged. For decades practically everything counter culture came from the left, while the right represented the establishment. So much so that we came to believe that the left was by it's very nature counter-cultural, and the right was by it's very nature pro-establishment. But something funny happened along the way. The left become dominant in virtually every cultural power center in America: the media, music, film and TV, the tech giants, publishing, etc. The problem is neither the left nor the right have genuinely digested this change. You see high-powered attorney's and corporate execs driving their 6-figure Telsa SUV's with "Resist" stickers on the back, as if they were some sort of scrappy underdog sticking it to "the man". There is a vibrant counter culture in America right now, it's just mostly on the cultural and political right. Think of the "intellectual dark web", or the fact that small indie right-wing publishers have popped up and conservatives are trying to create an alternative to big tech with things like Gab, Parler, and Truth Social. A lot these things have, or will, fail, but some will not. A lot of these things are also downright awful and generally offensive, but they are counter-cultural and designed to appeal to the long part of the tail. There are even whole series of children's books designed for conservatives. If a children's book about Amy Coney Barret isn't the definition of a long-tail product, then I don't know what is. The author's mistake is that he doesn't realize that he and people like him, are the establishment so they don't see a lot of the stuff in the long tail, simply because it's not meant for them and others living in the short tail of things. There's nothing wrong with being part of the establishment, it's just never been considered very cool, so everyone wants to think they're counter cultural.
• hamstergene 4y ago
  The author has oversimplified complex world into something simple, as simple as possible, and wrong. It costs almost nothing for a music service to add a niche album. That’s why they do it: if you type a search query in a foreign language into US streaming account, you will find bands irrelevant to 99.995% of US users. This music may have less “groomed” metadata than the Short Tail, but there is little reason for a streaming service to not want it. The same could be true for movies, but it’s not. Maybe because production costs a lot regardless of the movie will be successful or not. Or because movies are for one-time consumption, unlike music. Also copyright owners try to steal subscribers from Netflix to their own app, which is easier to pull with several studios than with millions of artists. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, OnlyFans are examples of alive and prospering Long Tail. I really doubt that Kindle store will ever start charging more for publishing books that target less than two dozens of readers. Whatever is going on, it is most definitely not as trivial as “living in the world of Short Tail”.
• cudgy 4y ago
  Observation. Long-tail boutique shops curate interesting content for their niche customers. Said customers buy this content from large aggregators like Amazon due to lower price or delivery advantages. Essentially the long-tail boutique shops serve as “free” advertising for the aggregators. This was the same in the early e-commerce wave of brick/mortar specialty stores being eviscerated by websites due to customers going to brick and mortar to physically touch and view merchandise only then buy it online for a cheaper price. For example, Fry’s Electronics, Best Buy, Sears, etc suffered from this trend. Hence, the new trend toward “influencers” on social media who demonstrate products and provide referral links to the big aggregators instead of selling the product themselves. Some of these influencers are able to brand their own products to make even more money, but they are in the minority.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  I don't agree with his interpretation. As I understand it, the long tail as applied to business just means that there is a significant chunk of the market made up of a big number of small items. You wouldn't try to disprove this by showing that blockbuster movie releases make up a huge portion of the movie industry, or that Spotify is a big player in the music industry, or that Amazon is a big player in the retail space, because the long tail doesn't preclude those things. If you wanted to argue against the existence of a long tail, you'd say something like "if Netflix got rid of everything except a few, very successful movies, their subscription revenue wouldn't change much", or "most people who pay for Spotify would keep paying even if the least popular 95% of the artists left" or "people don't value the fact that they can buy pretty much anything they can think of on Amazon," all of which seem like obviously incorrect statements (with no data on my part to back that up). The existence of aggregators doesn't disprove the long tail, you just have to talk about the long tail in terms of what people do inside those aggregators.
• zuminator 4y ago
  At the very least this essay is disingenuous. Gioia claims,"The Hollywood studios are even more obsessed with the Short Tail than the streaming platforms. Back in 2006, Anderson predicted the End of the Blockbuster —but what has happened since then?" What Anderson actually wrote: "For music, at least, this looks like the end of the blockbuster era." [my italics] Music and film are entirely different. For one thing, a newly released song on Spotify is entirely identical, bar recency, to a 30 year old song, they're both 4Mb aac files or whatever. Whereas the theatrical release at a cinema is qualitatively a much different experience to streaming on your iPad, even if the underlying media is identical. Anyway by their nature, just looking at contemporary theatrical releases in isolation doesn't work, because the long tail argument is about the back catalog and niche releases. If you include the back catalog, i.e. theatrical releases + streaming movies + DVDs purchases/rentals, then long tail still holds, and you can see that by the steadily decreasing share of revenue that the theater has versus all outlets. The North American domestic box office has plummeted since COVID, but taking the last normal year, 2019, it stood at $11 billion. Compare that with Netflix revenue of $20 billion. Not apples to apples, since Netflix is global, it has its own blockbusters, and its catalog is increasingly non-theatrical in appeal. But there are also plenty of other streaming services. All things considered, I think it's fair to still conclude that that smaller, niche product and back catalog continues to eat away at an increasing share of total revenue. Parenthetically, I just have to say I'm annoyed by Gioia's whole "Honest Broker" shtick. A true straight shooter doesn't have to advertise their honesty, they just speak their minds and others will see the truth for themselves. It feels a bit astroturfy how much play this guy gets on HN. For hot takes on a 16 year old book?
• abetusk 4y ago
  I think there's an interesting question (and answer) in this article but the author doesn't make it. Here's what I believe to be the fundamental error the author is making as highlighted by this throwaway line: """ ... The distribution is not quite that precise. Sometimes you will see a 90/10 relationship or a 75/25 split. But the key finding is that every activity is concentrated among heavy users and popular products. """ If the split goes down to 60/40 (40% sales lead to 60% profits), this starts getting into "real" money in terms of trying to capture the other 40% of the profits. Any overhead in terms of distribution, discovery, labor, rent, etc. will eat into that profit pushing it towards more of a 80/20 rule, or even 90/10. The talk of "long tail" in this context is noticing that iTunes, Netflix and Amazon don't need brick and mortar real estate, don't need warehouses of inventory (in some cases), don't need expensive distribution channels, etc. All those extra costs diminish profits. If the marginal costs of storage and distribution drop drastically this effectively changies the 80/20 rule into a 60/40 one, allowing them to not only reduce the reliance on "superstar" sellers by changing the proportion but also access the remaining tail of consumers. To further highlight the author's misread, here's another excerpt: """ The digital world hardly changes this equation. Even if Amazon doesn’t operate stores, it still has expenses (rent, labor, etc.), not much different than a bookstore. """ I'm not sure Borders or Barnes and Nobles ever broke double digit billions of worth. Amazon is values at over a trillion dollars. It's not that the author is incorrect, the equation is the same, but the generalization of the equation and it's realization seems to be lost on the author. The 80/20 rule can actually be 60/40. To say that Amazon is not much different than a bookstore is like saying a solar system is not much different than a galaxy. Yes, they still obey rules of physics but the scale and scope of relevant details are vastly different. But, this is all a guess on my part. I think it's easy enough to debunk the article on various aspects. Mostly this can come down to what a good definition of "long tail" is and what you're actually trying to point out. I do think there is a question underlying the article that should be answered. I think the better question is "Is the 80/20 rule a convergent rule, or can it go down to 60/40 (say) and what are the conditions in which this rule manifests?". There's also the question of how much resources to devote to providing "long tail" access to whatever product you're selling or market you're in and even if the ratio can be changed from 80/20 to 60/40, say.
• Izkata 4y ago
  > I’m not saying that all those ‘underground fringes’ that Anderson celebrated have disappeared—I’m merely claiming that they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in modern history. To operate on the fringe is almost akin to wearing an invisibility cloak from one of those Harry Potter stories. That's kind of a funny mention: Harry Potter was one of those niche long shots that turned into an unexpected hit. It just happened in the 90s. As I understand it, the "long tail" existed as a gambit to find the big hits like Harry Potter.
• bjourne 4y ago
  The long tail hypothesis went as follows. Plot a curve with products in descending order of popularity on the x axis and units sold (or other equivalent metrics such as downloads or views) on the y axis. The curve will approximate an exponentially decreasing function. As the cost of keeping inventory decreases, the curve will become more shallow. I.e the fraction of the curve's total area under the first x% will decrease. This hypothesis was utterly wrong and for most products the curve has become peakier (sharper) not shallower. I think people who comment haven't read Anderson's book - in hindsight it is laughable how wrong he was.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  Thought experiment: take all of the queries that Google deals with during a year. Then run all of the results together to get a set of webpages represented by the first five pages of results (does anybody still try to go beyond page 5?). The remove the rest of the web. Who will notice?
  • njharman 4y ago
    Almost everyone. But very few of them will notice the same things are missing. That is the very definition of the long tail.
• mikewarot 4y ago
  Old person (58) perspective -- You don't remember what it was like before the internet. We had a (1) local newspaper, Channels 2,5,7,9,11 and 32 on the TV. The most artistic things available on TV were William Alexander, Julia Child, and The Woodwright's shop. There was an explosion of things when VHS and Cable TV showed up, but still... the variety wasn't that great because they had to satisfy mass audiences. We've now got the long tail. If you want to watch a person clear out plugged drains for amusement, there's Post10. If you want to watch the machining of metal, there's MrPete222, ThisOldTony, ClickSpring, etc. If you want to learn about math, 3Blue1Brown, Mathologer, etc. There's PeriodicVideos, etc. And the Podcasts... so many podcasts. The tail is long and wild and wonderful. If there's something you're interested in, there's a niche somewhere exploring it.
  • Gimpei 4y ago
    Agreed! Television is so much better. Comics are better. Obscure music from all over the world is readily available rather than being stuck with top 40, solid gold, American bandstand. Board games are more variegated; beer culture has exploded; coffee tastes good. Pretty much everything that was dull and bland in my youth now has a rich fan culture. Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
    • cs137 4y ago
      Pretty much everything that was dull and bland in my youth now has a rich fan culture. Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it. If only they had the gumption to time travel and get cushy BoomerJobs instead of gig-economy nightmare labor under tight quotas and constant surveillance, they'd even have the time and money to enjoy it.
  • twiceaday 4y ago
    I spend hours every week watching a British man solve sudoku variation puzzles, as do his half a million subscribers. Hard to imagine this happening before. https://youtu.be/ejhtYYvUs5M?t=241 https://youtu.be/ejhtYYvUs5M?t=241
    • 4y ago
• woopwoop 4y ago
  I've never heard of this person, but I read most of their article. Kind of defeats their point, no?
• njharman 4y ago
  Maybe I missed the memo. I never thought of the "long-tail" about making money. I always considered freedom from curation, freedom of access, freedom from the mainstream, freedom from just what made some distributor the most money. I never thought (or heard) that it would "give a boost" to the fringe or cause Indie films to reach wider audiences. Just the opposite. It would (and did) make the obscure, zero commercial value, thing that on 3 to sub a million people *in the entire world* care about; distributable and "consumable". It wasn't ever gonna make the masses suddenly like embrace unique, interesting, bespoke content that by definition only a small percentage of people enjoy. It gave everyone access to their audience, no matter how uncommercial or unconnected to people/orgs/places that previously controlled distribution and access. In all of that. There is a ton that is moderately commercial, enough to support a creator or small team (see every monetized YT, Twitch, Indieagogo, Kickstarter, Lulu book, etc). For sure, not enough to support a multi-tiered industry of distributors, licensors, and middlemen. The gatekeepers lost their gate locks. The author doesn't see all of this because it so, so, so far under radar. [And they seem very focused on the commercial/profit side of things. As in if it doesn't make large commercial impact it's inconsequential. Which is weird to ignore the long end of the long tail.] If the author is lamenting the industry failed to capitalize on the long tail. Fuck that and them. I shed zero tears.
• hoseja 4y ago
  Here's a guy restoring vintage mechanical watches as a hobby, with over 600 patrons: https://www.youtube.com/c/WristwatchRevival https://www.youtube.com/c/WristwatchRevival
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bambax 4y ago
  The article conflates artists/content creators, publishers, and aggregators and use one or the other when it suits its argument. There are YT videos on any subject available, and then some. Many people post videos that have very few views, while at the same time, some creators addressing super niche content become wildly successful. To pick one example among millions, The Lockpicking Lawyer has become a meme ("nothing on one, click on two..."), and who would argue picking locks isn't part of the Long Tail?? It's possible to self publish and print on demand books that would never have existed before. Not in 1990, not in 2000, and not even in 2010. (I published one last year, sold around 1000 copies: that's the Long Tail right there!) Film producers are looking at hits? Of course they are. But you can find shorts on Vimeo that are innovative and original, and before our current age there was no way to discover such films except go to festivals, and watch only the films that had been selected by the organizers. Etc. To argue that the Long Tail didn't pan out is simply ridiculous.
• radley 4y ago
  64 year old man focused on 80-year old music can't see the rest of the tail. There's more music out there than just Jazz.
• hedora 4y ago
  I started skimming halfway through, but I didn't see any evidence in the article to support its central claim. What percentage of revenue / consumption is going to long tail content now, and how has that changed over time? I watch lots of recent movies on mainstream streaming services, and haven't heard of any of the sequels in the article's top ten list. Heck, I even mostly watch science fiction / action stuff, and passed on most of the things those movies are sequels of. I can't be alone in my viewing habits.
• hintymad 4y ago
  > Alternative voices would be nurtured and flourish. Music would get cooler and more surprising. Books would become more diverse and interesting. Indie films would reach larger audiences. Etc. etc. etc. Long tail in movies/tv shows certainly does not apply to me. I find my taste is amazing aligned with IMDB's cores, especially in actions and thrillers. If a show has a score higher than 8.0, 99% of time I'll love it. Bourne series is my favorite spy movies. I can't stop watching Better Call Saul. The list can go on. On the other hand, if a show's IMDB's slow is lower than 6.0, I can be almost certain that I won't like it. There are a few exceptions, such as Black Panther (its setup is just ridiculous, even among all the supe movies), but in general long tail in entertainment never worked on me or anyone I know.
• agnosticmantis 4y ago
  For those curious about terminology who like me may not know, the tail in 'long tail' does not refer to tail of a probability density/mass function, but rather the tail of a rank-size distribution which is closer to a (reversed) quantile function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank%E2%80%93size_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank%E2%80%93size_distribution
• fweimer 4y ago
  It's curious to bring up Amazon and AWS in this context, without noticing the myriad of SKUs that AWS offers. One could argue that all of them are virtual, so they don't really matter, but there is certainly a certain paralysis of choice when it comes to instance types, and it must also make it more difficult for AWS to schedule customer workloads efficiently.
• kromem 4y ago
  There's so much wrong with this piece it's mind blowing. I'm not sure where the author got the impression that the long tail promised sustainable income for long tail content creators - that was always antithetical to the concept. But if we look at YouTube's 6.9 billion in revenue for Q1 '22 vs Netflix's 7.9 billion in Q1 '22 it sure looks like the long tail still has a seat at the table. And it's about to explode. The problem with the long tail was the expense of content generation. We live in an age where long tail artists get paid to create VERY specific rule 34 erotic art for extremely unique fetishes - but it necessitates the desire for that art to exist to be greater than the threshold of the cost to create it. But the eventual erotic allowed version of DALL-E 2 is going to make SO MUCH bizarre porn at the cost of cents. The long tail is precisely the part of the curve that's going to be most impacted by the coming tsunami of change AI is going to bring. Why hire a service that has a C-list celebrity leave a happy birthday greeting for a loved one at $500 (current long tail) when you can have voice synthesis create an identical sounding result from an AAA celebrity (or extremely niche favorite celebrity of your loved one) for $0.005? The long tail hasn't failed. It's still doing pretty fantastic. This article not only falsely predicts the death of the long tail, it fails to recognize that the long tail is about to hit puberty.
• spullara 4y ago
  The long tail is on YouTube, a word not mentioned in an article about online content. This is absurd.
• smsm42 4y ago
  I think the article misses the point a bit. It argues long tail is still obscure and marginalized. But that's what the long tail is supposed to be. The question is whether it's accessible. I think niche content is still alive and well. Can you make a billion-dollar company out of it? Probably not, at least not on that alone. So what? Not everything in life, contrary to what many Silicon Valley folks think, should be a billion-dollar company. Maybe some over-enthusiastic folks sold the Long Tail story as something more than it is, but it doesn't mean the long tail is gone if it didn't achieve what those folks sold.
• lifeencoder 4y ago
  At first i thought it's related to SEO, but it isn't.
• nl 4y ago
  Listing "the biggest budget Hollywood films slated for release in 2022 or 2023" is literally listing the head, not the tail! If you want to look at the tail, look at something like the top rated movies of 2022[1]. There the number 1 film is "The Worst Person in the World"[2], a Norwegian romantic comedy with a budget of $5.6M and box office takings of $12.1M. There's also "Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché" - a documentary film about Poly Styrene, the lead singer of X-Ray Spex which won a British Independent Film Awards "Best Documentary" award and is soon to be released on Apple TV. That's what the long tail looks like. Lots of small successes, which in aggregate add up to a lot of people and a lot of money. [1] https://rtv2-production-2-6.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/?year=2022 https://rtv2-production-2-6.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Person_in_the_World_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Person_in_the_World_...
• nl 4y ago
  > I’m not saying that all those ‘underground fringes’ that Anderson celebrated have disappeared—I’m merely claiming that they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in modern history. Well QAnon related conspiracy theories led directly to an attack on Congress. Even if their sound track is non-existent their meme-game is hot so you can't even argue it isn't "cultural"
• osigurdson 4y ago
  Isn't YouTube a pretty good example of long tail? Sure, there are some very large channels but also many medium sized channels as well. It seems that these people can make a living this way as far as I can tell. Music is quite different however as it is a very hard to come up with a successful new musical idea it seems. Musicians are generally either incredibly successful or unknown. I don't think removing barriers (low cost recording, SoundCloud, etc) actually change the situation that much. We would likely have no fewer large and medium sized acts today if we still only had vinyl and radio. Perhaps art in general is naturally winner take all from a commercial standpoint.
• tegling 4y ago
  How about a concave payout function? What if someone with 10 million streams didn't expect to get paid a million times more than someone with just 10 streams? How about paying out some of the money randomly or as grants, that are more likely to end up in the tail? This could counter the economics presented in the article. I'm not familiar with these kinds of contracts so it might already be a thing or I may be naïve, but I'm not convinced linearly proportional payouts has to be a law of nature.
• popcube 4y ago
  the world actually flat now:(
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  In terms of statistics the interesting thing about the power law distribution is that it models extreme cases: blockbuster movies, billionaires, etc. As controversial as the "Bell Curve" book was, something it didn't point out is that the ability to create wealth is not normally distributed at all. That is, if there was a normal distribution of wealth there would be no Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Walton, etc. Ordinary books, ordinary people, etc. might well be modeled better with a normal distribution than with a power law distribution so setting out looking for the "long tail" may be a certain way to not find it.