14 ms·

Where did the long tail go? (2022)

95 points by nickwritesit 3y ago

baxtr 3y ago
The entire internet is the long tail. Heck, HN is a pretty long long tail! I sometimes wish we could go back in time to when you could only reach people by landline and there were only two TV channels.
- bmacho 3y ago
  HN is the antithesis of the long tail, it provides a very short, fixed length tail (~50 topics for 24 hours, and everything repeated), and the classic shared experience which literally disappeared from the world in the past few years. (Okay, every niche is a short tail in a long tail, still.)
PaulHoule 3y ago
One trouble w/ the long tail as a business is that people who are interested in the “long tail” have a huge amount of old content that they can enjoy. For instance I am still discovering old groups like Yellow Magic Orchestra. I despise the “classic rock” format where you will hear the same tired song in the morning and evening drive time every day, there is a show on a local college station that plays “classic rock” B sides, obscure tracks, bands that sound like “classic rock” bands you know but did not get so famous. The DJ apologizes if he plays any track he played in the last six months. Today my thing is anything that is recorded in a surround format be that traditional Chinese music or 2000s electronica or remnants from the 1970s quad era. New music that appeals to the short tail has to get my attention through all that.
- themodelplumber 3y ago
  > The DJ apologizes if he plays any track he played in the last six months. This is nothing. Back in Aichi Prefecture I had a neighborhood pirate DJ-cum-Yakuza errand boy who would cut off a finger every time his MD player skipped!
082349872349872 3y ago
https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu knows where some of it went...
hrdwdmrbl 3y ago
You are still free to [create your own economy](https://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-Prosperity/dp/B08XLNTD79 https://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-Prosperity/dp...)
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Step 1: Charge everyone $30 for a book. Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit.
  - hrdwdmrbl 3y ago
    The book is just a means to an end. I mention it as a summary of the idea that life is best when you make your own economy by making the internet work for you. A world of culture tailored to your preferences is available to those that want. For example, all the indie music is on Soundcloud and Bankcamp, not on Spotify.
fullshark 3y ago
The long tail of movies/TVs is youtube. The long tail of music is soundcloud. These content creators are using platform revenue + Patreon and tiny production costs to survive as basically hobbyist endeavors in many cases.
- gspencley 3y ago
  What worries me is that it is becoming more and more difficult to find the long tail on Youtube (I don't use Soundcloud so can't comment there). Youtube's search has become useless (to the point where it has become a meme that people are now using non-Youtube search engines to search for content on Youtube), and its recommendation algorithm is designed to promote what is popular (the short-tail). It's still possible to create a new channel on Youtube that offers something different, of course. It's just harder to get visibility on that content because the same "chase the short-tail, ignore the long-tail" strategy is starting to find its way into how modern search engines behave as well. I used to disagree with the claim that if you didn't rank in the top 5 search results you didn't rank at all. My disagreement was based on the fact that I earned a living from a website that received most of its traffic from organic search results. These days though, I think that's becoming more and more true based on how search engines present results to the user.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    YouTube seems to have some sort of multi-armed bandit approach going on because I’ll frequently be presented with a topical video with few subscribers and few views on my home feed.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Levitz 3y ago
  The author primarily talks money though. Yes the offer of music and video has increased substantially, but "long tail market"? Are there big enterprises making bank off niche consumers? I'm not so sure. As a consumer I don't care much either though, as long as the content is there.
dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): Where did the long tail go? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883206 - June 2022 (208 comments)
WeylandYutani 3y ago
It happens in videogames. Digital media is perfect for this business model. Yeah everyone knows Call of Duty, they sell like 20 million copies right? But then there is a game series called Atelier which has been around since the late 90s and they sell to a dedicated audience of sometimes literally less than 100k. And these games are expensive. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/9121/Atelier_Arland_series_Deluxe_Pack/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/9121/Atelier_Arland_se...
alexpotato 3y ago
I think this is ignoring that something that pops up in the Long Tail can go viral and become a block buster. One example from the days of the origin of the Long Tail was Bollywood movies. There aren't enough fans of Bollywood in one geographic location to warrant dedicating a whole theater to a showing. (I'm ignoring regional pockets, of course). However, if a movie gets lot of views online, that might boost it up the tail into the attention of more casual fans. In turn, they might boost-like it into more mainstream etc. That was much more difficult in the past where even if there was a lot of word of mouth praise, you still had the geographic distances.
colinsane 3y ago
anyone dealing with money should understand that the systems of coordination centered around money constitute the short-tail of all such systems. the conclusion of this piece leads me to believe the author understands this intuitively, but just hasn't put that into words yet. to lament that the long-tail of culture and production is supported via the long-tail of social/coordination systems is to lament that the long-tail is pervasive.
twobitshifter 3y ago
Some of my favorite things found online are old scanned engineering reports from before absolutely everything came out of a PC. These are definitely on the long tail. For example: https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/state-of-the-art/2/2.pdf https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/state-of-the-art/2/2.p... Of course these aren’t easy to find, and it’s only through specific searches that a hidden away scanned pdf put through OCR can be found. It would be great if there was more of a movement to scan all this material and put it online.
saurik 3y ago
This author isn't fundamentally confusing two entirely different points. The first is the idea that, as a marketplace for goods, there are a lot of--maybe (if you go all in on the premise) even the majority of--sales to be made within the long tail. Maybe you believe the 80/20 split the author here posits is a good reason to discard the 20%... I think that's dumb and I think that both Amazon and Spotify are constantly cited somehow in this article as doing something wrong demonstrates as much. But... the article spends most of its time moralizing about a very very different idea: a frustrating claim that anyone who believes in the long tail ever promised that if someone allocates their effort to making a product for a niche audience that they will make a bunch of money because "the blockbuster is in decline" not merely in total sales volume (due to the relatively new accessibility of the long tail) but is somehow a worse bet than making a niche product for a small audience. That is not only not the case in practice it is actually trivially not the case from the very idea of the long tail: every product on the long tail isn't making many sales by definition of where they are in the distribution. At one point this author finally states as much... but somehow it is against the long tail people, as this idea that people should go out of their way to make content for this segment was attributed to them as the most disingenuous form of strawman throughout the rest of the article :/. The long tail argument is merely that if you sell a bunch of stuff that a non-negligible amount of your sales comes from the long tail, not that the long tail is somehow itself fat and that the people making those products are going to ever manage to pull off a bunch of sales. If it is wrong, it is because people might want it to be a majority and not just "a lot", but FWIW in my experience 20% is "worth it", and if I went to a supermarket that only stocked the 10 most popular foods I'd find a better supermarket even if 80% of my purchases and 80% of their sales are from those 10 foods: it is really hard to run a business that only serves blockbusters. But... is it sane to allocate a bunch of time and money to making something that isn't a blockbuster if your goal is to maximize profit? Of course not, and no long tail advocate ever claimed as much! If you're concerned about where all that content comes from--and I can tell you this as someone who ran a very popular and even culturally-relevant content marketplace--it is largely people working on low or even negative budgets and for whom even a single sale is a life-altering moment. But like, if you take a percent of that person's one sale and you add it to the numerous other peoples' one sales, does it add up to "a lot" of money? Without even having to chime in with my own experience, we can actually note that even this author seems to claim--by their assertion in 80/20 or (later) 75/25--you could increase your revenue by 25-33% by bothering to open up your catalog... and that's even more the "I don't bother to shop at a supermarket where I can only find 90% of what I want"! The author thereby needs to stretch pretty far to explain away why markets like Spotify and Amazon disagree with the article, claiming that Spotify is I guess just wrong and will likely change their strategy in the future once they realize this author is smarter than them and that Amazon makes most of their money on AWS and so (supposedly) isn't a relevant data point... maybe it would surprise the author, then, to learn that Apple iTunes also allows pretty much everyone to list their tracks (and thereby contains an extremely long tail that certainly doesn't make people a lot of money but which absolutely helps cement them as a go-to destination to buy and collect music) and that, while Walmart has to make some tough decisions on shelf space, they have an extremely expansive online-only catalog. The only example they have of a marketplace (as the idea that a movie producer concentrates on blockbusters is not relevant to the premise) shrinking their content catalog is Netflix, and that's not at all Netflix's conscious strategic decision: they only were able to have all of that content for so long because the people who owned it didn't want to directly compete with Netflix and were willing to license it "on the cheap"... now that they all want their own streaming service, they are clawing back their interests region by region, and it frankly isn't clear that the gutted separate services are going to manage to sustain their users as well as the unified market could (which I will claim is in no small part due to long tail effects; their best strategy will likely be to re-form the old cable market by joining forces under a single subscription). I'm honestly not sure why this article has managed to captivate so many people given how mixed up it is in the premise, but I hope that readers spend some time really thinking about not only whether the points made in this article resonate in the order presented but whether they manage to correctly lead to the moral and economic conclusions they purport to before anyone ascribes to "the long tail" something only this author incorrectly understood and start--as I have seen many do--using it to justify actively shrinking a catalog or the idea that a large catalog isn't somehow a powerful moat (which someone tried to use against me once to claim how easy they thought it would be for just anyone to compete with Spotify).
barcode_feeder 3y ago
Such a weird, bad take. I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. I am very interested in a rather niche subcategory of tea. It has NEVER been more accessible. Art house cinema, indie videogames, bespoke accoutrements... you get where I'm going with this. This author is the reason the Long Tail is not flourishing. This author is content with Netflix and Spotify. This author is the problem.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. That's orthogonal to a long tail discussion though, which is about the distribution of streams (how many views/streams go to a small part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail), not their mere availability.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    The author doesn't give compelling evidence to suggest that the long term trend of "more options leads to more distribution of the audience" that you can see through the rise of cable TV, indie movies, streaming radio, etc, has been broken. It's especially hard for me to believe when the pre-modern-internet-platform availability of that long-tail content was zero. The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      That's all well, but it's not my point. First, TFA author might very well be wrong (or not give numbers to prove himself right), but I wasn't supporting the author. I was clearing up what someone could imply from the parent comment that just because obscure music "has NEVER been more accessible" this necessarily means we have a long tail effect. Your point shows the same misunderstanding in a more explicit way: "The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up", still doesn't automatically translate to long tail consumption. If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%).
crazygringo 3y ago
This article is not supported by the data provided. The first major example is about the availability of TV shows and movies on Netflix, but this isn't a reflection of consumption at all, or even of Netflix. Movies went down because other studios pulled their movie content. But it also shows that TV shows quadrupled from 530 to 2,108. That's big-time long tail increase. The next example is about more sequels in theaters, but theaters have never exhibited long-tail characteristics to begin with, so that's irrelevant. Then it goes on to Spotify and admits that it hasn't reduced its long tail, but says he "wouldn't be surprised". That's not evidence -- that's nothing. Then he claims that long-tail artists can't make a living on Spotify -- but the long tail has never been about content creators making money, that would be nonsensical in the long tail. It's always been about the platform making money from it. Then he finally moves to a fast-food restaurant and discovers that loyal customers make up most of revenue. Which, once again, has nothing to do with "long tail" because the long tail is about products, not customers. He finally concludes: > We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time. Yet provides zero evidence for this, and it's easily refutable just by looking at television. We used to all watch the same shows, now we all watch different shows. It's common to mention your favorite show and not only has your friend/coworker not scene it, they've never even heard of it. Same with your favorite band, same with your favorite author. Total available content has exploded. We live in a Long Tail society.
- tmaly 3y ago
  YouTube is for most of the younger generations, the new TV. If that is not long tail, I don't know what is.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Yeah, the long tail on Spotify is longer than the music long tail has been EVER. I bounce between literally hundreds of artists in a year, per their stats. I was never doing that twenty years ago with CDs and mainstream radio. Same with mainstream movies + 4 broadcast networks + a few premium cable channels compared to all that plus all the streaming stuff, all the stuff on Youtube, etc. Hardly anything gets the population share of viewers that something like I Love Lucy or Mash or Friends used to get. Indie video games, blogs, self-published novels, the list goes on and on and on and on.
whorleater 3y ago
If we buy into the fact that we can account for "culture" onto this distribution, this article assumes that the distribution has remained the safe size and shape, and so he draws the conclusion that the long tail is declining or disappearing. But the nature of the long tail is that it is comprised of a series of outliers. To use the author's analogy, what might be happening is that there's a distributional shift occurring at the same time the general amount of "stuff" under the curve is increasing, which gives the appearance that things have become more alike, even though what has actually happened is that the bump has just gotten bigger.
GolfPopper 3y ago
Just one more example of the Long Tail to add to the pile: I'm a tabletop roleplayer (have been one for over 4 decades). I have more content legally available to me now than I ever have before. I've recently bought (ebook) copies of obscure RPG material from the 70s that I've been looking for for years. I can easily find quality content for current RPGs (like D&D 5E) even if it's extremely nich, and simultaneously and I buy great new material explicitly written for for AD&D's First Edition!
jsiva 3y ago
Platforms such as Etsy, Gumroad and ironically Substack are significantly (if not totally) targeted towards the long tail. An argument can be made that these platforms are not successful enough to justify serving the long tail, but the author started the article with concern for counterculture and then ties widespread financial success as a metric for healthy countercultures. A better metric would be the amount of viable lifestyle businesses operating within cultural niches but no data on this is present within the article. The author makes several references to a consulting project where they also state that serving niches is not viable, this is probably true for whatever client was looking to branch into this. With the provided examples, the article reads as a defense of those previous findings.
coldtea 3y ago
Many here seem to confuse "availability of more content" with the "long tail". The "long tail" concept about content, as made famous in the 00s by Chris Anderson's best-seller, is about the distribution of content consumption, not it's mere availability. Basically about how many views/streams go to a small ("popular") part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail. Having more content available (or some people watching less popular stuff) is required but not sufficient property to have a long tail effect.
kabdib 3y ago
The long tail is alive and well on Steam, for one thing.
irrational 3y ago
> Anderson proudly declares, based on data analysis, that 98% of offerings will find at least one buyer every 3 months. Even those candles that smell like Apple computers or that creepy Nicolas Cage pillowcase. Recently I learned that my teenage son purchased a movie called “Dad’s Can’t Dance”, which is only available from this website: https://www.daddycantdance.com/ https://www.daddycantdance.com/ Why? I have no idea (why do teenage boys do any of the things they do?), but there can’t be many people buying this movie off a random website.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
cushychicken 3y ago
I think Ted sort of missed the point. The Long Tail is a way of saying: "There's a ton of tiny markets out there that you can go and serve, and make a decent, if small, living off of." That's your shot at your own little 80/20 microcosm, if you do it right.
kristopolous 3y ago
This is myopic. Basic cable and top 40 radio is still a thing. It's not like you need to dip into the historical archives to do comparative analysis here. Turn on FM radio, surf through the low number channels on tv ... the difference between that and what I consume on the net has a venn diagram of two distant far away circles. Not only, but the concentration of the top tier has diluted. Just look at the rating for the most watched shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States#Series_by_year_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio... If you exclude sports, the ratings are half of what they were pre-broadband. There used to be a collective culture dictated by presumed media consumption up until maybe 15 years ago. That's also gone. The long tail has been so victorious, it's overtaken the dominant framing so it can no longer be seen as distinct. It'd be like saying "jet airplanes" were no longer a thing because we've dropped the term "jet" when in reality, they've become so dominant for commercial air-travel, the comparison for the normal passenger no longer exists.
computator 3y ago
> 80/20 rule: 20% of customers were responsible for 80% of revenues > Sometimes you will see a 90/10 relationship or a 75/25 split. It's funny that his examples add up to a nice round 100, but it doesn't have to. The number of customers and percentage of revenue are two independent measures, and they don't have to sum to 100. You could have 20% of customers giving 99% of revenue (a 99/20 relationship) or 10% of customers giving 60% of revenue (a 60/10 split). I assume the author is well aware of this, but likes his examples to sound like the well-known 80/20.
- hantusk 3y ago
  The Pareto principle is about the converse as well
- tomsmeding 3y ago
  Though for any such distribution, there is a point on the curve where the numbers _do_ sum to 100. Surely 0.0001% of customers provide less than 99.9999% of revenue, but surely 99.9999% of customers provide more than 0.0001% of revenue. Somewhere in between, assuming continuity(*), there's a ratio that sums to 100. Not to detract from your point at all — just a curious observation. * In a way assuming continuity is weird because the underlying numbers are discrete. But in approximation it's fine here if the number of customers is large enough, I'd say.
  - FabHK 3y ago
    Nicely put. Another way of seeing this: any Lorenz curve will intersect the “other” diagonal (from top left to bottom right). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_curve
  - bmacho 3y ago
    So the 80/20 rule is about where it happens, and not about that it happens! I've never realized it before! Okay, you are probably not really interested in the point where they sum up to 100, and you just want the 80% of the profit, whether the distribution gives 80/10 or 80/78 (where all customers give you almost the same profit, revenue and cost). Still a useful rule.
janalsncm 3y ago
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the exact opposite is happening, that the long tail has exploded and the most popular shows/movies/books/songs no longer have the same universal appeal. Mainstream culture is experiencing death by multiverse, where every genre and subgenre is filled with an endless supply of content and the shared media diet that defined American culture is for the most part dead. I was going to write a counter-counter-culture bit eulogizing that shared media landscape, but the fact is media is not culture. Culture has existed long before media, and is much larger than that. Shallow similarities like watching the same shows cannot replace loving one another.
nologic01 3y ago
The shape of the tail of the distribution of human activity is sensitive to many factors which may explain the diversity of opinion as to what is happening. To start with, human society is very prone to long tails by the fact we are distributed widely and have limited means of communicating and coordinating. All sorts of inventions, technical and social work on this substratum and produce more or less long lived tail phenomena. E.g. the internet famously enables the long tail, but then the first page of google effect squashes it. Similarly social media platforms enable cheap and easily accessible dissemination but then algorithmic timelines and virality enhancers intervene to create "winners" There is a complex interplay between concentration of power, wealth, control and technological capabilities on one side (the left end of the distribution) and the shape of material and information flows on the other (right end of the distribution or long tail).
hermitcrab 3y ago
I have used Google Adwords pretty much since it started. You used to be able to get a fair number of very targetted clicks very cheaply in Adwords by targetting 'long tail' search terms. But Google have made that harder and harder over the years, for example by eroding things like exact match. Now it is pretty much highest bidder gets all the clicks.
lbayes 3y ago
I like that the article is making me think about my beliefs in the long tail and how they may be in tension with my beliefs in the pareto principle. The core long tail claim, as I remember it, was that the _area_ under the long tail was larger than the _area_ under the head. Sometimes much larger. I vaguely recall a claim that many businesses chopped off the market tail because it was often too expensive to serve those tiny segments (inventory, retail space, distribution, etc.), but that new technologies were reducing or eliminating some of these costs and making it possible to serve emerging, smaller markets profitably. I wonder if some portion of businesses that see pareto distributions in their sales are just lopping off long tail revenues? I thought that was the central claim. I also wonder if those pareto variants (i.e., 95/5 splits) were businesses that had potentially over optimized on their largest volume offerings? Amazon was the quintessential long tail example, and I'd be surprised if anyone could claim that their their SKU count has decreased since 2006. YouTube comes to mind as another great example of a business capitalizing on this phenomenon. Consolidating markets (like ??) may be counter examples. Now I'm curious about how to choose when to push in which direction.

95 points by nickwritesit 3y ago

The entire internet is the long tail. Heck, HN is a pretty long long tail! I sometimes wish we could go back in time to when you could only reach people by landline and there were only two TV channels.

bmacho 3y ago
HN is the antithesis of the long tail, it provides a very short, fixed length tail (~50 topics for 24 hours, and everything repeated), and the classic shared experience which literally disappeared from the world in the past few years. (Okay, every niche is a short tail in a long tail, still.)

PaulHoule 3y ago

One trouble w/ the long tail as a business is that people who are interested in the “long tail” have a huge amount of old content that they can enjoy. For instance I am still discovering old groups like Yellow Magic Orchestra. I despise the “classic rock” format where you will hear the same tired song in the morning and evening drive time every day, there is a show on a local college station that plays “classic rock” B sides, obscure tracks, bands that sound like “classic rock” bands you know but did not get so famous. The DJ apologizes if he plays any track he played in the last six months. Today my thing is anything that is recorded in a surround format be that traditional Chinese music or 2000s electronica or remnants from the 1970s quad era. New music that appeals to the short tail has to get my attention through all that.

themodelplumber 3y ago
> The DJ apologizes if he plays any track he played in the last six months. This is nothing. Back in Aichi Prefecture I had a neighborhood pirate DJ-cum-Yakuza errand boy who would cut off a finger every time his MD player skipped!

082349872349872 3y ago

https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu knows where some of it went...

hrdwdmrbl 3y ago

You are still free to [create your own economy](https://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-Prosperity/dp/B08XLNTD79 https://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-Prosperity/dp...)

moffkalast 3y ago
Step 1: Charge everyone $30 for a book. Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit.
- hrdwdmrbl 3y ago
  The book is just a means to an end. I mention it as a summary of the idea that life is best when you make your own economy by making the internet work for you. A world of culture tailored to your preferences is available to those that want. For example, all the indie music is on Soundcloud and Bankcamp, not on Spotify.

fullshark 3y ago

The long tail of movies/TVs is youtube. The long tail of music is soundcloud. These content creators are using platform revenue + Patreon and tiny production costs to survive as basically hobbyist endeavors in many cases.

gspencley 3y ago
What worries me is that it is becoming more and more difficult to find the long tail on Youtube (I don't use Soundcloud so can't comment there). Youtube's search has become useless (to the point where it has become a meme that people are now using non-Youtube search engines to search for content on Youtube), and its recommendation algorithm is designed to promote what is popular (the short-tail). It's still possible to create a new channel on Youtube that offers something different, of course. It's just harder to get visibility on that content because the same "chase the short-tail, ignore the long-tail" strategy is starting to find its way into how modern search engines behave as well. I used to disagree with the claim that if you didn't rank in the top 5 search results you didn't rank at all. My disagreement was based on the fact that I earned a living from a website that received most of its traffic from organic search results. These days though, I think that's becoming more and more true based on how search engines present results to the user.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  YouTube seems to have some sort of multi-armed bandit approach going on because I’ll frequently be presented with a topical video with few subscribers and few views on my home feed.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Levitz 3y ago
The author primarily talks money though. Yes the offer of music and video has increased substantially, but "long tail market"? Are there big enterprises making bank off niche consumers? I'm not so sure. As a consumer I don't care much either though, as long as the content is there.

dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): Where did the long tail go? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883206 - June 2022 (208 comments)

WeylandYutani 3y ago

It happens in videogames. Digital media is perfect for this business model. Yeah everyone knows Call of Duty, they sell like 20 million copies right? But then there is a game series called Atelier which has been around since the late 90s and they sell to a dedicated audience of sometimes literally less than 100k. And these games are expensive. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/9121/Atelier_Arland_series_Deluxe_Pack/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/9121/Atelier_Arland_se...

alexpotato 3y ago

I think this is ignoring that something that pops up in the Long Tail can go viral and become a block buster. One example from the days of the origin of the Long Tail was Bollywood movies. There aren't enough fans of Bollywood in one geographic location to warrant dedicating a whole theater to a showing. (I'm ignoring regional pockets, of course). However, if a movie gets lot of views online, that might boost it up the tail into the attention of more casual fans. In turn, they might boost-like it into more mainstream etc. That was much more difficult in the past where even if there was a lot of word of mouth praise, you still had the geographic distances.

colinsane 3y ago

anyone dealing with money should understand that the systems of coordination centered around money constitute the short-tail of all such systems. the conclusion of this piece leads me to believe the author understands this intuitively, but just hasn't put that into words yet. to lament that the long-tail of culture and production is supported via the long-tail of social/coordination systems is to lament that the long-tail is pervasive.

twobitshifter 3y ago

Some of my favorite things found online are old scanned engineering reports from before absolutely everything came out of a PC. These are definitely on the long tail. For example: https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/state-of-the-art/2/2.pdf https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/state-of-the-art/2/2.p... Of course these aren’t easy to find, and it’s only through specific searches that a hidden away scanned pdf put through OCR can be found. It would be great if there was more of a movement to scan all this material and put it online.

saurik 3y ago

This author isn't fundamentally confusing two entirely different points. The first is the idea that, as a marketplace for goods, there are a lot of--maybe (if you go all in on the premise) even the majority of--sales to be made within the long tail. Maybe you believe the 80/20 split the author here posits is a good reason to discard the 20%... I think that's dumb and I think that both Amazon and Spotify are constantly cited somehow in this article as doing something wrong demonstrates as much. But... the article spends most of its time moralizing about a very very different idea: a frustrating claim that anyone who believes in the long tail ever promised that if someone allocates their effort to making a product for a niche audience that they will make a bunch of money because "the blockbuster is in decline" not merely in total sales volume (due to the relatively new accessibility of the long tail) but is somehow a worse bet than making a niche product for a small audience. That is not only not the case in practice it is actually trivially not the case from the very idea of the long tail: every product on the long tail isn't making many sales by definition of where they are in the distribution. At one point this author finally states as much... but somehow it is against the long tail people, as this idea that people should go out of their way to make content for this segment was attributed to them as the most disingenuous form of strawman throughout the rest of the article :/. The long tail argument is merely that if you sell a bunch of stuff that a non-negligible amount of your sales comes from the long tail, not that the long tail is somehow itself fat and that the people making those products are going to ever manage to pull off a bunch of sales. If it is wrong, it is because people might want it to be a majority and not just "a lot", but FWIW in my experience 20% is "worth it", and if I went to a supermarket that only stocked the 10 most popular foods I'd find a better supermarket even if 80% of my purchases and 80% of their sales are from those 10 foods: it is really hard to run a business that only serves blockbusters. But... is it sane to allocate a bunch of time and money to making something that isn't a blockbuster if your goal is to maximize profit? Of course not, and no long tail advocate ever claimed as much! If you're concerned about where all that content comes from--and I can tell you this as someone who ran a very popular and even culturally-relevant content marketplace--it is largely people working on low or even negative budgets and for whom even a single sale is a life-altering moment. But like, if you take a percent of that person's one sale and you add it to the numerous other peoples' one sales, does it add up to "a lot" of money? Without even having to chime in with my own experience, we can actually note that even this author seems to claim--by their assertion in 80/20 or (later) 75/25--you could increase your revenue by 25-33% by bothering to open up your catalog... and that's even more the "I don't bother to shop at a supermarket where I can only find 90% of what I want"! The author thereby needs to stretch pretty far to explain away why markets like Spotify and Amazon disagree with the article, claiming that Spotify is I guess just wrong and will likely change their strategy in the future once they realize this author is smarter than them and that Amazon makes most of their money on AWS and so (supposedly) isn't a relevant data point... maybe it would surprise the author, then, to learn that Apple iTunes also allows pretty much everyone to list their tracks (and thereby contains an extremely long tail that certainly doesn't make people a lot of money but which absolutely helps cement them as a go-to destination to buy and collect music) and that, while Walmart has to make some tough decisions on shelf space, they have an extremely expansive online-only catalog. The only example they have of a marketplace (as the idea that a movie producer concentrates on blockbusters is not relevant to the premise) shrinking their content catalog is Netflix, and that's not at all Netflix's conscious strategic decision: they only were able to have all of that content for so long because the people who owned it didn't want to directly compete with Netflix and were willing to license it "on the cheap"... now that they all want their own streaming service, they are clawing back their interests region by region, and it frankly isn't clear that the gutted separate services are going to manage to sustain their users as well as the unified market could (which I will claim is in no small part due to long tail effects; their best strategy will likely be to re-form the old cable market by joining forces under a single subscription). I'm honestly not sure why this article has managed to captivate so many people given how mixed up it is in the premise, but I hope that readers spend some time really thinking about not only whether the points made in this article resonate in the order presented but whether they manage to correctly lead to the moral and economic conclusions they purport to before anyone ascribes to "the long tail" something only this author incorrectly understood and start--as I have seen many do--using it to justify actively shrinking a catalog or the idea that a large catalog isn't somehow a powerful moat (which someone tried to use against me once to claim how easy they thought it would be for just anyone to compete with Spotify).

barcode_feeder 3y ago

Such a weird, bad take. I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. I am very interested in a rather niche subcategory of tea. It has NEVER been more accessible. Art house cinema, indie videogames, bespoke accoutrements... you get where I'm going with this. This author is the reason the Long Tail is not flourishing. This author is content with Netflix and Spotify. This author is the problem.

coldtea 3y ago
>I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. That's orthogonal to a long tail discussion though, which is about the distribution of streams (how many views/streams go to a small part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail), not their mere availability.
- majormajor 3y ago
  The author doesn't give compelling evidence to suggest that the long term trend of "more options leads to more distribution of the audience" that you can see through the rise of cable TV, indie movies, streaming radio, etc, has been broken. It's especially hard for me to believe when the pre-modern-internet-platform availability of that long-tail content was zero. The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    That's all well, but it's not my point. First, TFA author might very well be wrong (or not give numbers to prove himself right), but I wasn't supporting the author. I was clearing up what someone could imply from the parent comment that just because obscure music "has NEVER been more accessible" this necessarily means we have a long tail effect. Your point shows the same misunderstanding in a more explicit way: "The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up", still doesn't automatically translate to long tail consumption. If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%).

crazygringo 3y ago

This article is not supported by the data provided. The first major example is about the availability of TV shows and movies on Netflix, but this isn't a reflection of consumption at all, or even of Netflix. Movies went down because other studios pulled their movie content. But it also shows that TV shows quadrupled from 530 to 2,108. That's big-time long tail increase. The next example is about more sequels in theaters, but theaters have never exhibited long-tail characteristics to begin with, so that's irrelevant. Then it goes on to Spotify and admits that it hasn't reduced its long tail, but says he "wouldn't be surprised". That's not evidence -- that's nothing. Then he claims that long-tail artists can't make a living on Spotify -- but the long tail has never been about content creators making money, that would be nonsensical in the long tail. It's always been about the platform making money from it. Then he finally moves to a fast-food restaurant and discovers that loyal customers make up most of revenue. Which, once again, has nothing to do with "long tail" because the long tail is about products, not customers. He finally concludes: > We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time. Yet provides zero evidence for this, and it's easily refutable just by looking at television. We used to all watch the same shows, now we all watch different shows. It's common to mention your favorite show and not only has your friend/coworker not scene it, they've never even heard of it. Same with your favorite band, same with your favorite author. Total available content has exploded. We live in a Long Tail society.

tmaly 3y ago
YouTube is for most of the younger generations, the new TV. If that is not long tail, I don't know what is.
majormajor 3y ago
Yeah, the long tail on Spotify is longer than the music long tail has been EVER. I bounce between literally hundreds of artists in a year, per their stats. I was never doing that twenty years ago with CDs and mainstream radio. Same with mainstream movies + 4 broadcast networks + a few premium cable channels compared to all that plus all the streaming stuff, all the stuff on Youtube, etc. Hardly anything gets the population share of viewers that something like I Love Lucy or Mash or Friends used to get. Indie video games, blogs, self-published novels, the list goes on and on and on and on.

whorleater 3y ago

If we buy into the fact that we can account for "culture" onto this distribution, this article assumes that the distribution has remained the safe size and shape, and so he draws the conclusion that the long tail is declining or disappearing. But the nature of the long tail is that it is comprised of a series of outliers. To use the author's analogy, what might be happening is that there's a distributional shift occurring at the same time the general amount of "stuff" under the curve is increasing, which gives the appearance that things have become more alike, even though what has actually happened is that the bump has just gotten bigger.

GolfPopper 3y ago

Just one more example of the Long Tail to add to the pile: I'm a tabletop roleplayer (have been one for over 4 decades). I have more content legally available to me now than I ever have before. I've recently bought (ebook) copies of obscure RPG material from the 70s that I've been looking for for years. I can easily find quality content for current RPGs (like D&D 5E) even if it's extremely nich, and simultaneously and I buy great new material explicitly written for for AD&D's First Edition!

jsiva 3y ago

Platforms such as Etsy, Gumroad and ironically Substack are significantly (if not totally) targeted towards the long tail. An argument can be made that these platforms are not successful enough to justify serving the long tail, but the author started the article with concern for counterculture and then ties widespread financial success as a metric for healthy countercultures. A better metric would be the amount of viable lifestyle businesses operating within cultural niches but no data on this is present within the article. The author makes several references to a consulting project where they also state that serving niches is not viable, this is probably true for whatever client was looking to branch into this. With the provided examples, the article reads as a defense of those previous findings.

coldtea 3y ago

Many here seem to confuse "availability of more content" with the "long tail". The "long tail" concept about content, as made famous in the 00s by Chris Anderson's best-seller, is about the distribution of content consumption, not it's mere availability. Basically about how many views/streams go to a small ("popular") part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail. Having more content available (or some people watching less popular stuff) is required but not sufficient property to have a long tail effect.

kabdib 3y ago

The long tail is alive and well on Steam, for one thing.

irrational 3y ago

> Anderson proudly declares, based on data analysis, that 98% of offerings will find at least one buyer every 3 months. Even those candles that smell like Apple computers or that creepy Nicolas Cage pillowcase. Recently I learned that my teenage son purchased a movie called “Dad’s Can’t Dance”, which is only available from this website: https://www.daddycantdance.com/ https://www.daddycantdance.com/ Why? I have no idea (why do teenage boys do any of the things they do?), but there can’t be many people buying this movie off a random website.

aaron695 3y ago

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cushychicken 3y ago

I think Ted sort of missed the point. The Long Tail is a way of saying: "There's a ton of tiny markets out there that you can go and serve, and make a decent, if small, living off of." That's your shot at your own little 80/20 microcosm, if you do it right.

kristopolous 3y ago

This is myopic. Basic cable and top 40 radio is still a thing. It's not like you need to dip into the historical archives to do comparative analysis here. Turn on FM radio, surf through the low number channels on tv ... the difference between that and what I consume on the net has a venn diagram of two distant far away circles. Not only, but the concentration of the top tier has diluted. Just look at the rating for the most watched shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States#Series_by_year_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio... If you exclude sports, the ratings are half of what they were pre-broadband. There used to be a collective culture dictated by presumed media consumption up until maybe 15 years ago. That's also gone. The long tail has been so victorious, it's overtaken the dominant framing so it can no longer be seen as distinct. It'd be like saying "jet airplanes" were no longer a thing because we've dropped the term "jet" when in reality, they've become so dominant for commercial air-travel, the comparison for the normal passenger no longer exists.

computator 3y ago

> 80/20 rule: 20% of customers were responsible for 80% of revenues > Sometimes you will see a 90/10 relationship or a 75/25 split. It's funny that his examples add up to a nice round 100, but it doesn't have to. The number of customers and percentage of revenue are two independent measures, and they don't have to sum to 100. You could have 20% of customers giving 99% of revenue (a 99/20 relationship) or 10% of customers giving 60% of revenue (a 60/10 split). I assume the author is well aware of this, but likes his examples to sound like the well-known 80/20.

hantusk 3y ago
The Pareto principle is about the converse as well
tomsmeding 3y ago
Though for any such distribution, there is a point on the curve where the numbers _do_ sum to 100. Surely 0.0001% of customers provide less than 99.9999% of revenue, but surely 99.9999% of customers provide more than 0.0001% of revenue. Somewhere in between, assuming continuity(*), there's a ratio that sums to 100. Not to detract from your point at all — just a curious observation. * In a way assuming continuity is weird because the underlying numbers are discrete. But in approximation it's fine here if the number of customers is large enough, I'd say.
- FabHK 3y ago
  Nicely put. Another way of seeing this: any Lorenz curve will intersect the “other” diagonal (from top left to bottom right). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_curve
- bmacho 3y ago
  So the 80/20 rule is about where it happens, and not about that it happens! I've never realized it before! Okay, you are probably not really interested in the point where they sum up to 100, and you just want the 80% of the profit, whether the distribution gives 80/10 or 80/78 (where all customers give you almost the same profit, revenue and cost). Still a useful rule.

janalsncm 3y ago

I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the exact opposite is happening, that the long tail has exploded and the most popular shows/movies/books/songs no longer have the same universal appeal. Mainstream culture is experiencing death by multiverse, where every genre and subgenre is filled with an endless supply of content and the shared media diet that defined American culture is for the most part dead. I was going to write a counter-counter-culture bit eulogizing that shared media landscape, but the fact is media is not culture. Culture has existed long before media, and is much larger than that. Shallow similarities like watching the same shows cannot replace loving one another.

nologic01 3y ago

The shape of the tail of the distribution of human activity is sensitive to many factors which may explain the diversity of opinion as to what is happening. To start with, human society is very prone to long tails by the fact we are distributed widely and have limited means of communicating and coordinating. All sorts of inventions, technical and social work on this substratum and produce more or less long lived tail phenomena. E.g. the internet famously enables the long tail, but then the first page of google effect squashes it. Similarly social media platforms enable cheap and easily accessible dissemination but then algorithmic timelines and virality enhancers intervene to create "winners" There is a complex interplay between concentration of power, wealth, control and technological capabilities on one side (the left end of the distribution) and the shape of material and information flows on the other (right end of the distribution or long tail).

hermitcrab 3y ago

I have used Google Adwords pretty much since it started. You used to be able to get a fair number of very targetted clicks very cheaply in Adwords by targetting 'long tail' search terms. But Google have made that harder and harder over the years, for example by eroding things like exact match. Now it is pretty much highest bidder gets all the clicks.

lbayes 3y ago

I like that the article is making me think about my beliefs in the long tail and how they may be in tension with my beliefs in the pareto principle. The core long tail claim, as I remember it, was that the _area_ under the long tail was larger than the _area_ under the head. Sometimes much larger. I vaguely recall a claim that many businesses chopped off the market tail because it was often too expensive to serve those tiny segments (inventory, retail space, distribution, etc.), but that new technologies were reducing or eliminating some of these costs and making it possible to serve emerging, smaller markets profitably. I wonder if some portion of businesses that see pareto distributions in their sales are just lopping off long tail revenues? I thought that was the central claim. I also wonder if those pareto variants (i.e., 95/5 splits) were businesses that had potentially over optimized on their largest volume offerings? Amazon was the quintessential long tail example, and I'd be surprised if anyone could claim that their their SKU count has decreased since 2006. YouTube comes to mind as another great example of a business capitalizing on this phenomenon. Consolidating markets (like ??) may be counter examples. Now I'm curious about how to choose when to push in which direction.