Where did the long tail go? | Hacker News Reader

Where did the long tail go?

tedgioia.substack.com

281 pointsjger15208 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

This is beautiful.

During the Rubik's Cube craze of the early 1980s, people would gather round to watch a skilled person solve one. I seem to recall even seeing it on TV. Behavior is the same, technology has just allowed a change in scale.

One thing does suck, though... the elimination of social sharing of bookmarks, music, videos, etc. For example, when Napster was a thing, I started buying 2-5 CDs per payday because I was discovering so much great stuff. They they (the record companies) started comparing the sharing of music with Piracy of Ships on the High Sea, and suing customers... and things imploded. F*ck the record companies!

Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome way to discover interesting things because people actually shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it got killed

This trend repeats over and over as too much capital seeks too few resources. 8(

>Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome way to discover interesting things because people actually shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it got killed

There are still social bookmarking sites. However:

1. Relatively speaking, very few people use them

2. Even those of us who have been using them since delicio.us mostly don't bother sharing

The sharing is probably mostly on Twitter these days.

I use pinboard a lot but have my bookmarks defaulted to private so I don’t have to deal with the mental friction of whether someone would judge me for it.

Ironically my Twitter faves are likely much more useful in building a profile of me.

I'm always surprised and intrigued when people recall discovering music through Napster. All I remember is using it as a pirate search engine for songs that I already knew I wanted.

How did Napster work as a music discovery tool? Obviously there was some aspect I was missing out on.

Before it got weird, you could look and see all the music a given person was sharing.... and that's how I found some amazing stuff I'd never heard on the mainstream radio stations.

I figured it was the right thing to do to actually buy the music, so I was doing that. Somewhere I've got a few hundred CDs on spindles that I bought retail at full price.

If you found someone else on, say, your college network, you could download songs from them faster than you could read their titles.

Direct Connect (and later DC++) had a few good years for this :)

Are you looking for a site where people share interesting links on a variety of subjects? Perhaps we could make it even better if we had high quality discussion of those links. But of course, we should have good moderation of the submissions and comments so folks stay on topic. Maybe we could bootstrap the site by appealing to a small subculture, like “news for hackers”.

Yes, if only there was a site like this.

wherever that is, this comment won't be found on it.

I've been on hn for a long time and I like it for what it is. But it doesn't do music discovery and only occasionally does other sorts of discovery. There are plenty of things to miss about the earlier web.

subreddits? basically music subreddits are half the usual reposts and the other half is the usual reposts of "recommend me artists/albums/tracks like this" :)

It's a different model of consumption.

Voting systems are based inherently on popularity.

Whether that's direct or whether it's a FoaF operation, such as "those who like x also enjoy y" - it's still a popularity system.

All popularity systems centralize and are extremely hostile to divergences and counterintuitive things.

It'd be like if you asked the bedeviling Monty Hall problem, took a survey of the most common answer and only presented that one while the correct one gets hidden and downvoted. The centralizing feedback loop is because you're now reinforcing the most common wrong answer as the right one and thus the noise becomes the signal.

The failure of these systems is it pushes up those who know how to be popular and not expertise. It regurgitates commonality.

There's other ways. You can for instance, take a movie you like, see what studio made it, the director, the whatever - sound engineer, then browse out from there. It's a version of the Monty Hall problem where you go "let's only look at what most mathematicians say".

My favorite analogy for this is if you went to a beginner's karate/yoga/physical therapy class on the first day and took a survey of a proper punch/movement and considered the instructor's opinion as an equal vote with the 20 other first day people and went with whatever the plurality was. Or you went to the doctor's office and along with the doctor, surveyed the patients in the waiting room what their opinion of your ailment was. Or a foreign language class and had the students guess a translation and assign the fluent instructor's answer equal weight.

No really, that's how we've structured most content curation on the internet. Exactly like that.

Naive equal democracy and systems weighted in popularity are fine for general purposes but completely fail for the narrowband where specialized expertise is desired because it occludes expert knowledge systems and networks and swaps it out for popularity systems and tribes.

> when Napster was a thing, I started buying 2-5 CDs per payday

You and no one else. Lars Ulrich was right.

Practically speaking it could be that bands‘ doing it all themselves may be an actual improvement, or may be a wash. Hard to tell. at least they have better control over their intellectual property.

> Lars Ulrich was right.

Which reminds me of this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeKX2bNP7QM

In my case, I didn't buy CDs, but I did buy lots of singles. I was probably one of the earlier iTunes customers, and LimeWire and RantRadio were where I found my music.

> discovering so much great stuff

Spotify is doing this for me with their algorithms and playlists. I assume they're based on "other people that listen to this, also listen to this other thing".

Pinterest is Del.icio.us for people outside of tech. It's widely used and the behaviors are almost exactly the same as how people used to use Del.icio.us.

And Spotify playlist sharing is a very common thing and a popular way for people tio discocver new music.

During the period you mention CD sales grew YOY >10%.

If you want to build your own keyboard, now there are a billion parts easily available and tons of instructional videos on it. When I was a kid, model aircraft were fun, but you’d either go to the local hobby store or look through the Tower Hobby catalog. People built kits or sometimes made things themselves, and a lot of really interesting techniques were passed down through clubs and mailing lists. Now with the drone scene, there are many many more parts to choose from, all kinds of simulators and flight assist technology to almost completely avoid the expensive and time-consuming build-fly-crash loop, tons of resources in forums, videos, discord servers (I guess we did have IRC back in the day which is part of how I learned programming).

The long tail has been growing since the 90s, but consumerism has been growing even faster.

Yeah, look at the US population share of pre-cable, pre-internet things like I Love Lucy or Elvis. Nothing these days is even close to dominating pop culture in the same way.

The author doesn't see it because they're swimming in it (even Substack is part of it) and it's so common that it's no longer noteworthy. They pay attention just to what's happening inside tentpole motion pictures that they ignore how much bigger the world of content outside of them has gotten. There's no monolithic "counterculture" because there's now thousands of them.

Human perception adapts to everything and turns everything into "normal".

Today all those things you mentioned are "mainstream", thus where are the counter culture things we used to have?

100% agreed

The author seems to think about counter culture in terms of large groups like the bohemians and beatniks. Instead, we have an unlimited supply of niche communities people can join. Seems pretty great to me.

The author alludes to something that resonated with me. I think the point he is trying to make is that even a lot of independent art is homogenized and tired because its underpinnings are more tied to a hustle-culture mindset than to actually asking something of the experiencer.

>Instead, we have an unlimited supply of niche communities people can join. Seems pretty great to me.

I think the issue is with the discoverability of those communities. When they're so small and niche and there are so many of them, discoverability suffers. There's a curation element that's missing and that algorithms driven by / manipulated by commercial pressure don't provide.

I don't think we have a modern day replacement for John Peel, for example. We have tons of content (soundcloud etc) but the few people sorting the wheat from the chaff don't seem to be able to muster an audience. The art/talent of curation is much undervalued.

Madjestic Kasual (not to be confused with the much more popular channel which this is a parody of) is a really interesting YouTube channel that does just that; the curator seems to spend a lot of time seeking out independent music of a particular aesthetic and sharing it and has mustered at least some audience. I'd like to collect more channels/aggregations/internet magazines like this

Yeah, that's the idea. Nice channel.

Marc Riley continues where John Peel left off. Ezra furman's (guest filling for marc riley) shows also uncover a wealth of stuff, but less Now and more the last 5-10 years

Yeah, on Radio 6, which nobody who isn't a music enthusiast listens to. Peel's show was on R1. That's kinda what I'm saying about discoverability - how does anything get into the mainstream when 'mainstream' and 'up-and-coming' are now strictly segregated? There has to be a bridge connecting the two paths.

Maybe I'm just biased but I think it should be the job of the BBC to ram culture down people's necks whether they think they're going to like it or not, because otherwise they'll just listen to the same old crap for their entire lives.

> I think the issue is with the discoverability of those communities.

Honestly, I think this is why we don't see fatter tails than we see today. Google, YouTube, Netflix, and even Spotify push us into bubbles. Many of us are drawn in because on the exploration/exploitation scale it is high on exploration. But as we use the service more they focus more and more on exploitation. I remember awhile ago reading a blog my netflix (?) how it is actually easier to satisfy customers with wide variety of tastes and love the exploration paradigm. Maybe the next step is to figure out who is who or when someone is in a exploration mood. I'd assume that's common given that everyone jokes about scrolling around on Netflix for 15 minutes only to leave.

>Maybe the next step is to figure out who is who or when someone is in a exploration mood.

Why try and read people's minds when you can just make it an option? Half the problem (with so much modern tech) is algorithms trying to 'figure out' stuff like that. Just ask the user. And stop feeding back so much user behaviour into algorithms, it always converges to zero.

I would presume you'd want to have that explore option use different algorithms. When in the exploration situation you still want to narrow down what kinds of topics people want to find and not just a random assortment. You're always going to have to "read people's minds" to some extent because there's too much information and too many options out there. You should probably increase this exploration value as the user continues to scroll.

Also, if someone is scrolling and scrolling you'd probably want to increase your exploration hyperparameter as time goes by. So thus we're pretty much automating what is done above by user behavior. You don't really need to read someone's mind because they are already explicitly telling you that what you've presented to them isn't what they are looking for (otherwise they would have clicked it by now).

Though, for convenience I think you could find clear patterns in certain behaviors. For example, I'm one of those people that like to fall asleep to a show that I've seen a few times already. It is pretty easy to predict that. You can sure predict that if I'm opening Netflix late at night that I want to watch Star Trek.

Bob Ross and some old German guy painting on PBS would challenge Roy Underhill’s Dad Jokes any day.

If you want to watch someone swear about power tools, using swears you didn’t even know existed, AvE. And if that’s not weird enough for you, watch an ex-felon with a deep Chicago accent talk about plants on Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t.

AvE is awesome... I have zero idea why he ends with keep your * in a vice, though.

It might be a joke on “keep your stick on the ice”. That was always my assumption.

It's a Canadian joke - a play on "keep your stick on the ice" from ice hockey.

It is also the last line in most episodes of Red Green, so I've never been sure if he's just making a general Canadian Cultural reference or specifically a Red Green reference.

How was live music and entertainment though?

I mean, stuff that wasn’t available because the technology didn’t exist was obviously not as good.

And none of the channels you’ve mentioned are counter culture. 3blue1brown, Mathologer, etc are a combination of being able to do stuff because animation is easy and cheap to do, but they are hardly long tail at this point.

A weird one is watching people fix the hooves on horses, something about is captivating.

>> The tail is long and wild and wonderful.

Well argued! I concur.

Another notable thing on TV was ABC's Wide World of Sports; if you wanted to see anything outside the Big Four of North American sports plus bowling, golf, and horse/auto racing--(say, curling or rodeo stuff or water-skiing), they were the only game in town.

Even auto racing wasn't immune. Most were usually shown only as edited highlights, often days later.

The Indy 500 wasn't broadcast live until 1986.

That's the main criticism of NBC's Olympics coverage even now; we're still fed only edited highlights when there's no longer a technical reason to do so.

You got 6 channels? What luxury that must have been?

We only got 3 reliably - the ABC and CBS affiliates, and an independent UHF station. That's right, we couldn't even get NBC programming. Once in awhile it would come through, and rarely the indie Channel 5 from NYC.

There was a small city several towns over, maybe a 25-30 minute drive, that had a daily paper. Locally we only had a weekly.

Two thoughts.

1) The 80/20 rule is a percent so absolute numbers can go up while relative numbers stay the same. So I’m not sure looking at absolute numbers of available items over time is good enough. You’d also want to look at sales/access I think (which isn’t the easiest to do).

2) You do bring up a good point. I wonder if there is a difference when an individual entity is largely responsible for market costs vs a market of producers where many individual entities are responsible for the costs / risks.

I haven’t thought this fully through but it seems like there might be something there (amazon products vs amazon seller products, spotify may be an exception here but how much music isn’t on the platform? vs soundcloud, youtube handles streaming costs/sales in the form of ads while producers handle production costs, and podcasts are almost entirely paid by producers unless on spotify where streaming costs/sales are paid by the platform)

>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.

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.

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/ )

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree Disney’s handling of the Star Wars was a dumpster fire from a story standpoint.

However, the Star Wars acquisition has been extremely profitable financially and the IP is still quite valuable. 2.1% of the company + 2.21 Billion was easily worth it. Theme park attractions, toys, etc just let them leverage IP in ways few companies can match in the short term.

People keep showing up to spend a billion dollars at the box office for Star Wars movies. Internet discourse isn’t necessarily a good indicator for the success of mainstream movies.

The discourse surrounding Marvel is ten times as grumpy, Star Wars is simply underperforming. The Mandalorian was a decent save, but they're out of films that a bunch of people will go see no matter what, now that the core storyline is told.

There's time to turn the ship around, but if the next two cinema releases are duds the franchise is in real trouble. Marvel can blow a movie any time they like.

It's Disney, I expect they'll squeeze profit out of the IP for a long time to come, but that might end up dominated by short animated series aimed squarely at kids. Hard to say, Favreau understands what Star Wars is and hopefully they see that and scale it.

> now that the core storyline is told

how is it told? it's ... ripe for a proper reboot or whatever. time to step out of the tall shadow of Vader.

Marvel had a vision and went with it. It was a by definition hyper-fractured caricature of a nice story, but they kind of made it work.

The Star Wars universe could have much more consistency and depth at the same time, if they pick a vision.

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.

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.

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 !

> 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.

Even before Amazon a fair number of big box chains removed a lot of oxygen from the retail ecosystem. No small number of those chains themselves went out of business--yes, in part because of Amazon. (Also Walmart.)

I don't really buy the "will never be profitable" part although perhaps less so than AWS.

If AWS is as profitable as he says there must be a huge opportunity in offering lower cost cloud infrastructure.

I find it curious that the other two top-brand public clouds do not undercut AWS significantly in areas like network bandwidth charges, when other operators can offer similar service it vastly reduced cost. This does look like a market failure, and I don't know why we are in this situation. Maybe the top brands are just very, very strong?

Big customers don't pay list prices, they get negotiated rates. To the extent Azure and GCE are interested in competing on price, it's the big customers they're after. All cutting list prices would get them is a bunch of price sensitive small fish, and that's not where the money is.

I think we're finding that tech oligopolies don't lend themselves to healthy markets. The barrier to entry to becoming a full service public cloud is massive. The established players know that there is little chance of an upstart coming out of nowhere to eat their lunch, so they compete (or don't) appropriately. Getting cutthroat on pricing would only hurt everyone's bottom line.

Smart phone apps are the same story. Android and IOS developers have to deal with draconian rules and exorbitant fees. In a healthier market other companies would swoop in and improve on those huge fees and arbitrary moderation, but creating a new smartphone platform is ridiculously difficult, which means that the two established players can basically do what they want within the law.

Remember that Google doesn't pay for bandwidth in either direction due to it owning such a large percentage of the backbone. But yet it still charges the same egress fees as the other cloud providers.

No large customer pays retail for anything anywhere.

> Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable

Far, far from reality. Amazon retail can be very profitable - the amount of data, arbitrage, and scale is just unmatched by any other company.

My guess--and I admit that it is just a guess--is that Amazon retail is only profitable if you have something unusual that you're selling, and the unusual aspect of it can be described by your potential buyers in words. As an example of something that can be described by words, I had a brass sextant on my wish-list (don't ask why), and a relative bought it for me recently; it was easy to find, didn't have to search through pages of hits, and was from what I suspect is a very small seller.

Otoh, I wanted to buy some sandals like the ones I had back in the <date omitted to hide old fogy's true age>. It appears there are 167 pages of hits for men's leather sandals, not enough ways to narrow the focus--and not all the hits are even sandals (some are ordinary shoes). Oddly, before I specified a size, it said there were 7 pages; when I told it my size, it jumped to 167 pages. (Go figure.) Worst, most are name brands; I can select name brands, but I can't say "anything but name brands." And while I said "men's" sandals in my search, women's sandals (labeled as such) are showing up.

In sum, Amazon does not make it easy to find small retailers' products, unless they're really niche products. (Books are different, because titles and authors are pretty unique.)

Yeah, but wasn't Squid Game Netflix's last blockbuster? That's certainly not your standard Hollywood-style blockbuster. So that means it does offer a way for weird niche stuff to get really big.

IDK that you can say Squid Games isn't part of a trend when Korean pop culture and arts are having a pretty big moment around the world (K-pop is massive, Parasite kicked ass at the Oscars) and EVERYONE wants a dystopia story because of how the shitty the world feels.

Squid Game doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere, and is actually pretty derivative (go re-watch Running Man or Battle Royale).

I think you underestimate the scale of how “short tailed” everything used to be.

Yes yes tiger king, stranger things, etc. these things are popular.

In 1983 over 50% of the entire United States watched the last episode of MASH live as it aired on NBC. And people talked about it for 10+ years.

Not only that, but the long tail has been much much more representative than the days of the short tail ever was.

Everyone knew that there was a huge audience for hip hop, but we’ve only seen how huge that audience was since it came to dominate streaming charts.

I thought it was great when Klinger got married.

This nightmare of Hawkeye's is something I'll never forget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3_iRh2Ryk

Mid tail

According to Chuck Klosterman in his book on 'The Nineties' more people watched an average episode of Seinfeld than watch the finale of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos.

About the only thing that remains for mass audiences is sport. Even there on demand replays of sports are changing things.

Also don't best selling records or streams or whatever actually indicate far less revenue and a far smaller share of what people are listening to than they used to ?

> 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.

It's also losing sight of books. There's so, so many books out there, it could be called even more fractured than modern TV/streaming, and yet big hits happened. When I was in school in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone at least knew of (if not was a fan of) Animorphs, Goosebumps, Redwall, Harry Potter (before the movies), etc.

That's more of a childrens/YA literature thing. It tends to be much more short-tailed than adult fiction. Although adult nonfiction is also extremely short-tailed, probably even more than YA.

Those specific ones perhaps, but I worked in a library for a year and there is so much variety in every section that I think it's much more long-tailed/"fractured" than the media everyone else is talking about. That was my point: Even when stuff is fractured, there are standouts that manage to become hits, and it even happened without the reach of the internet. My examples were some of them from that era.

Neflix is not really a good example as they are bounded to what copyright owners are charging, and they can't really pick and choose things that they did not produce outside of what's not owned by Big Content copyright holders. At the early days, I imagine, one could get a license to stream a lot of things for relatively cheap, since nobody knew if there's any money in it at all, so no risk to let some weirdos to play with it. Now everybody knows large content catalog costs serious money, so Netflix can't just license it for cheap anymore. Using it as a proof that the "long tail" has no value is exactly the opposite of what is happening, I think.

> everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan

Of course they do, did you see the long tail picture? Did you notice the peak on the left side? That's Obi-Wan. It's expected to be there. Its existence does not disprove the right side of the picture. Have some patience and listen until they stop talking about Obi-Wan - then the interesting part starts.

All this is also very american. Other languages/culture are variate as well and mixing your local culture with some anglo-american influence is super interesting too.

None of my ancestors spoke English, thanks to the internet I'm the first one. It really doesn't feel like stagnation, if people knew what people thought outside of French, their mind would be blown. The contrary is true too (but somehow we fail to attract, probably because English is the short tail, French the long tail) !

> 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".

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.

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.

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...

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.

In NYC a typical bar-band gets one free bear per player, sometimes not even that.

What type of bear? Polar bear? Grizzly bear?

just kidding, I'm almost sure you meant beer ;)

Thanks I'll edit it

Breaking out of the long tail never had good odds.

I suspect the investment though for indie bands now is a lot cheaper (cheaper than say filling up the van at every college-town stop).

Yes. But that model applies to every one. That is, the lower bar leads to more noise (read: crap bands) and morw competition).

Easy means, less effort. Less effort means less creativity.

It's a race to the bottom.

There's still a hurdle — artists still have to be prolific and have the drive/energy to record/edit/upload. That alone filters out most of the noise.

Lacking a long tail, culture becomes a race to the banal.

Prolific has nothing to do with quality.

I sold music (i.e. dance / electronic music) from 1990 (pre-internet) and into the mid+ 00s. I saw what easier production and easier distribution did for quality.

Ask any DJ who has lived long enough, and no one will tell you there's less noise.

I don't doubt there's more noise (I wasn't arguing there wasn't — rather that there is still a hurdle).

The alternative is worse though.

If there's an excess of noise, then there is no effective hurdle. A bit of natural unavoidable friction (e.g., uploading song) is not a hurdle.

We do have more choice. Unfortunately, there's been a disproportunate increase in friction / noise.

A net loss, which supports the article's theory.

An arbitrary barrier to entry raises the bar. If you charged everyone who wanted to make music $1000 before they could get started, you'd get higher quality music on average just because you'd filter out most of the people who are less serious about it. I'm not convinced it's a good thing though.

What good is investment if there is no revenue? The best way for indie bands to make money is still touring and merch. So unless they're one of the lucky breakout acts, they still have to invest in filling up the van. And even relatively successful indie albums make little money in royalties from streaming.

Long tails have been around for a long time.

If you worked out how to crack the distributor game, you could make a VERY comfortable living back in the 90s producing mediocre dance music under many different names.

You could make a VERY comfortable living as a writer in 80s and 90s writing for niche literary or special interest magazines. Or producing mid-market fiction. Especially romantic novels.

Until around 2000, you could make a VERY comfortable living as a competent but not outstanding orchestral sessions musician, as long as you lived in one of the bigger music cities (London, LA, NY, Tokyo, Berlin.) Until around 2010, likewise for pop session musicians (add Nashville and a few others.)

Most of those opportunities have disappeared.

The Long Tail hasn't added anything. It has shuffled around the opportunities. So now you can make a VERY comfortable living as a niche YouTube star, as long as you're the right kind of extrovert and - ideally - at least a little good looking.

And so on for all the other current market slots.

They're not really new at all - just updated variations on the old "self-employed creative" roles which happen to favour a different set of skills.

Thank you. This validates my decision not to become a competent violist. When I see orchestras play, I sometimes wonder if I could have made a career of it.

The point isn't that the long tail hadn't existed before, it's that more people have access to it through new technology. In other words, it's the difference of approximating a probability distribution with 1 billion points instead of 1 million.

Before the internet, long tail effects were present with the 1M that could get past the gauntlet of labels and distribution conglomerates. After the internet, musicians had better avenues to get money more directly from fans and fans had better tools for discovery.

You characterize it as being a zero-sum game but I don't believe this is right. I think it's easier now than ever to generate a (small, potentially liveable) income stream from 'mediocre dance music', niche writer, etc.

There are more full-time musicians and musicians earning a living than there were 20 years ago [0] [1]. This is directly due to the internet being the distribution channel.

I would imagine other fields have been effected similarly though I haven't seen a broad study.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2013/05/30/massive-growth-independe...

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/raine-group-indepe...

I had to explain to someone younger than me why my bookshelf has a bunch of signed first editions of like Jay McInerny and Brett Easton Ellis and Tama Janawitz. It’s not because it’s landmark writing (I have a soft spot for it but I’m honest enough to admit that’s just quirk, not literary analysis).

But I can read those things on the Kidle app mostly. I own the books, which were not expensive in money but we’re in effort, because they remind me that in living memory you could be a rockstar celebrity from writing books. I’m not making a moral judgement, maybe I’m just dating myself, but that’s just important to me.

Are those content creators being fairly rewarded?

Define fair. Also, not sure fair is even the goal for many of them. If you want to maximize your revenue, you are nearly always better off on your own platform. So these platform take a cut and it is left to the user to make a choice if it's worth it.

What's "fair"? More people are getting their work seen than ever. But there's no law that if you create something people are going to pay you for it. That's never been the case.

It's hard to get real numbers from across the spectrum but the short answer is that the popular ones are doing very well. I posted a link on HN to a Magic the Gathering YouTube streamer doing an incredibly transparent breakdown of his income. If you want hard numbers (albeit with a sample size of 1) that'd be a good place to start.

I have about 100 supporters on Patreon and this makes enough money for me to cover my bills, and spend my days swanning aimlessly about my town’s cafes and parks, drawing whatever I want to draw. About 15% of what I make goes to Patron and payment processing.

Agree. This article is saying Head content is still king. That is true. But The Long Tail wasn’t necessarily about the long tail being bigger than head. It was that long tail was viable at all.

I don’t see how anyone can argue against there being more choice than ever before across all sectors of products and content.

>But The Long Tail wasn’t necessarily about the long tail being bigger than head. It was that long tail was viable at all.

Anderson's point was somewhat different as I recall. It wasn't that individual long tail content is necessarily financially viable for its creators. (Which seems mostly true even if there are some breakouts who wouldn't have existed at least in the same form 25 years ago.) It's that long tail content in aggregate could be financially viable for distributors and other sellers--which seems at least somewhat true.

With a hindsight lens, you could argue that the long tail was about profiting off the labor of free and low-paid content creation--although a somewhat counterargument is that consumers get a lot of value too and much of the content is stuff that would never have seen the light of day at least beyond a tiny circle of friends and fans in past times.

> It's that long tail content in aggregate could be financially viable for distributors and other sellers--which seems at least somewhat true

I don't disagree with that point, rather I never cared that the long tail would be "financially viable for distributors". In fact, I suppose I prefer that it is not viable for them.

Long live the long tail!

Well, if it weren't financially viable for the distributors, the long tail wouldn't really be accessible beyond mostly local audiences--as was the case before the mid 90s or so.

If long tail content isn't financially viable for YouTube, then YouTube either doesn't exist, charges for hosting, or gatekeeps.

I think what happened is that since YouTube makes its business with advertisements which are "free" for the users, users get accustomed to the idea that content should be free. That lowers the quality of the music because why invest more in quality than what is needed to provide free convent.

If nobody is paying for it except with their eye-balls how much should you expect to profit, and thus how much should you invest in producing your content? Not much hence quality goes down and everybody suffers from poor cultural offerings.

> [the point was] that long tail content in aggregate could be financially viable for distributors and other sellers--which seems at least somewhat true.

Bandcamp has always been pretty transparent about their sales numbers and they are at $200 million annually now. They are about as “long tail” as it gets.

Yes, Bandcamp is a pretty good example of a fairly pure long tail aggregator. They're a private company but they seem to be modestly profitable. Which I guess can be glass half full or half empty depending on your perspective. i.e. you can make money for yourself and for at least some long tail artists, but it's not blockbuster returns.

I think I’m really done with the idea of success being a unicorn company. Bandcamp profitably supports something like 100 employees and makes thousands of indie musicians a significant amount of money. That feels like a smashing success to me. I don’t need a private island.

I for one love it.

Forums for sci-model builders — where kit-makers can sell you a resin kit made in their garage of Luke Skywalker's "T-167 Sky Hopper" (or whatever).

Electronic kits you would not have found in Radio Shack: Kim-1 replicas, Apple-I replicas, a SCSI emulator for vintage computers, etc.

Fan films that you would have been lucky to catch at a sci-fi convention are now a click away on YouTube.

And never mind how many of these garage kits, fan films, etc, would have even been produced if there were not a niche forum where these could be sold/displayed.

Many of the successful YouTube creators seem to me to be of the type "somebody in a room, with a camera, Play Button on an Ikea shelf". Looks like moderate middle-class trappings.

If that is successful, what does the long tail look like?

I mean, there are a lot of people making videos. But I don't really believe many of those get their full income from it.

part of that is just the youtuber aesthetic. MKBHD basically looks like that, but i don't think there's any doubt that he's making good money off youtube

The long tail looks exactly like that, but without a Play Button. Luck aside, rewards are usually exponential. Is a breakout vlogger with a million subscribers a hundred times better than one with ten thousand? Is he even ten times better?

Yep, author doesn't even mention YouTube. I have found more art and artists via YouTube than I have from Disney.

He talks about the "long tail" but then turns around and talks about mainstream (ha ha) companies like Netflix, talks about "Hollywood", etc. The long tail is not going to come from corporate America, and never was.

I don't think that necessarily contradicts his point.

It may be the case that the long tail/niche market/counterculture market is also winner-take-all [1], so that non-mainstream content is much more available, yet almost no one actually producing such content can really make a living at it.

[1] Per the article, in the context of "solving a Long Tail problem": "And when I looked at products instead, I found the same distribution: 80% of sales came from 20% of the products."

Yes, but it's a much longer and flatter tail.

I regularly watch economically prosperous content on youtube that would have had zero chance of distribution 10 years ago.

The game is different and it's too early to tell if things are better now than before. We're seeing a lot of no-talent rich kids ("influencers") as they take over the commons. Facebook used to be a way that anyone, in theory, could gain social influence. Now, it seems to ratify one's lack of influence; if people (e.g., employers, literary agents) look you up on Twitter and see less than 5,000 followers, they assume they can get away with shit.

This being said, I think we are past the nadir. We're going from an age in which we had incompetent curators to one in which we don't know who the curators are. As they say about traditional vs. self-publishing, the problem for self-publishing is that there are no gatekeepers, and the problem with traditional publishing is that it has lousy gatekeepers (lousy because they care more about short-term marketability than literary merit). How this is all going to shake out is anybody's guess.

What concerns me is the amount of power tech companies now have. It's great that a talented nobody can become a Youtube star, at least now... but what happens if Youtube decides to change its algorithm to punish leftist content? How do we prevent spurious copyright strikes? How do people who are de-platformed for illegitimate reasons (this literally happened to me) seek justice? How do we make sure we're not just building another reputation market that rich people will corner? That's what the tech companies want, after all, for the sole reason that it's most profitable.

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.

To add to your examples, there are now a bunch of independent content creators making a living from platforms like YouTube, Twitch, OnlyFans, etc.

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.

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.

The last one or two decades really solved a lot of distribution problems of the long tail. You can not make a decent living playing live medieval tavern music on Twitch (and supplement with income from Spotify). Or make a living drawing fanart with DeviantArt and Patreon, publish your indie game on Steam and consoles with relative ease, get books printed in runs of 100 copies, instead of tens of thousands.

The thing the author misses is that they are looking at what big companies are doing. But big companies aren't well suited for serving the long tail, because there are fewer economies of scale in doing that. The vast majority of supply in the long tail comes from individuals or small companies, often people who start it as a hobby and notice there's enough money to do it full time.

And the economics work out, because the more underserved a niche the higher the prices that are acceptable. A teddy bear at the corner shop is $10, but plushies in fandoms where little official merchandise exists go for ten to fifty times that.

> You can not make a decent living playing live medieval tavern music on Twitch

Typo? Did you mean "now" rather than "not"?

I agree and see the long tail primarily as a "phase shift" from firms back to individuals.

Niche works used to be indulged by media corporations as gambles. They would let the whole thing be fully produced right from the beginning, though often compromising authorial vision in the process or pulling the plug early. Then audiences would gamble with cash to view the work. Occasionally one broke through and you had a surprise blockbuster.

Now much more is in the hands of the actual creator, and more stuff is "view for free" and payment is more often driven by secondary merchandising, creating community space or other elements that are ancillary to the work. The average production quality is lower and the medium is often platform defined(social media engagement is now a major component of audience building), but as a creator you have a gamut of choices to stitch together into some business - often one that bypasses gatekeepers. While blockbusters still exist, they're "hollowed out" because most of their good ideas have to be borrowed now.

The actual market for the content only became bigger to the extent that we can saturate our eyeballs.

I generally agree, but with one caveat.

> music, as the author points out. Kpop popularity in the west is probably a big example, but also artists getting famous on SoundCloud.

Kpop is manufactured to formula by record labels and is being aggressively marketed worldwide. It is very big business and increasingly mainstream. It is analogous to 'blockbuster movies', demonstrating the consolidation of content providers and world interests. Soundcloud artists on the other hand are very long tail.

This is a good example of the dichotomy I see going on. The long tail is still alive and well, but there's a bit of consolidation in the traditional media industries, Hollywood, the big music labels, AAA games, etc. While, self publishing platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, Patreon, Steam, etc. are where the long tail thrives.

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.

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.

> ” 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.

>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.

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.

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.

Most novelists are, and have always been, amateurs and many of those are fairly indifferent to payment. And the vast majority of musicians are amateurs who play for fun, and always has been.

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.

Yep. There's definitely some value in having a shared cultural context, and we're losing that.

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.

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.

Disney -- They acquired the rights to Rocky and Bullwinkle (and Betty Boop, too, IIRC) simply to eliminate competition from the long tail.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

My goal was to illustrate the arc, from indie bootstrap to AAA success. I don’t recall Chair as a AAA studio in 2010. The development of PUBG, which began as a mod of another game, might be a better example.

I did messed up here by mixing concepts from “Free” in with the concepts from “Long Tail”. I went back and re-read the Long Tail article from WIRED and edited my patent comment above to correct that error.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Person_in_the_World_...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

The irony of writing an article about the long tail being a myth on a niche substack blog…

A blog where literally the next article is "50 Essential African Albums (Part 3 of 3)", as I pointed out to the author.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Almost everyone. But very few of them will notice the same things are missing.

That is the very definition of the long tail.

Here's a guy restoring vintage mechanical watches as a hobby, with over 600 patrons: https://www.youtube.com/c/WristwatchRevival

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.

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.

Netflix and Disney are the head. TikTok and YouTube are the tail. The head may be bigger, but the tail is certainly thriving.

I've never heard of this person, but I read most of their article. Kind of defeats their point, no?

The long tail is on YouTube, a word not mentioned in an article about online content. This is absurd.

At first i thought it's related to SEO, but it isn't.

The long tail is always temporary - a cambrian explosion followed by a bottleneck that picks the winners, and the next cycle begins

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"

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.

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!

the world actually flat now:(

same for:

10,000 hours

grit/growth mindset

1000 true fans

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.

> "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.

419?

My crotchety take on this is that basically anything worth consuming has remained that way excelusively by not being profitable.

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