The Long Tail (2004)

I know this article is about media that can be distributed digitally which has fundamentally different dynamics that real world objects, but I think that the thinking behind it is what caused me to think that, with international supply chains and an ever-growing market, that niche hardware products would also become more common. That has proven to be almost exactly the opposite, as is most clearly demonstrated in the smartphone market: despite getting larger every year, the breadth of available hardware configurations is every narrowing as companies compete solely the median consumer. I don't quite understand why it isn't possible to survive catering to an (objectively large, but proportionally small) niche consumer, but it is apparently not possible.

This has come true. Consider movies:

   2022 US box office revenue: $7.3 billion
   YouTube 2022 revenue: $29.2 billion

For video games, my guess is it's even more stark: there are tens of thousands of games on Steam and millions of games on the iPhone.

I remember this article. The issue today is that there is so much abundance of digital products that streaming sites like Spotify need to charge extra for content considered premium: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/discovery-is-the-original... I think that with the online marketplace "optimized" for low cost- Amazon and Direct from Supplier available through Drop Shipping, the long tail needs to focus on more basic goods, like housing and transportation.

a life-changing book for a lot of people in the #SEO game aeons ago <3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail_(book)

Are niche consumer apps possible in today's world?

GenAI means we can all consume media that basically never existed before. The long tail just got about a million times longer.

Anyone got any hints for what is the modern day (2024 and onward) equivalent of obtaining passive income or something with an autonomous or semi-autonomous Perl script?

I mean, why isn't it easy for someone that knows computer programming to earn a humble five or three dollars a day with a Python script running 24/7 on a Raspberry Pi single board computer? Is outlier independent video game development really the best we can do, for an escape program that wants to get you away from the standard and disappointing career?

I promise I would invest my seed capital returns from the Python and Raspberry Pi combo back into the startup and not blow it on unnecessary purchases!

Ah yes, those naive years when we thought an archive of historical information would be placed on the internet for our use. That was before everything was segmented into different worlds and cut and divided into small pieces, attempting to provide more value, and more justification for all the negotiators in the background.