If you haven't yet heard - or used - the phrase 'the long tail,' you're not buzzword compliant for 2005.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine, coined the phrase in an article that appeared last fall in that magazine. He's now writing a book on the long tail phenomenon, and along the way, posting to a Weblog.
Here at Supernova, he's giving a PowerPoint talk (albeit with some elegantly designed slides - mostly graphs).
The long tail is the right-hand end of a power law curve. If you've got big hits on the left, you've got niche products on the right. Before the Internet, many of those niche products - whether movies, music, or books - had a hard time getting distribution, finding audiences, and generating revenue.
The long tail economy isn't new; it was born alongside the Internet, and sites like Amazon.com, Yahoo, and eBay, which suddenly rendered shelf space infinite. (Anderson even says that 19th century media like the Sears Catalog can be viewed as early examples of the long tail.)
Anderson says there are three big opportunities in the long tail economy:
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, conferences, Chris Anderson, eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., WIRED Magazine, Microsoft PowerPoint |
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Recent Comments | 8 Total
June 22, 2005 at 9:04am by jim wilde
"Be a filter, and help people navigate and sort through the bounty of content" shameless promo:
Ideascape has many of the same aggregation features/functions of 3rd party blogging services (technorati, del.icio.us et al), which makes it ideal for an internal blogging platform. An organization with hundreds or thousands of internal bloggers needs the ability to search on the elements of time, people, and tags to spread and cultivate ideas across the business. What's more, every post is rss enabled with multiple feeds and combinations on tags, groups, departments, individuals, dates, etc. In other words, you can follow what's going on in your organization as well as in the blogsosphere on a micro or macro level just by subscribing to rss feeds, using basic search, or using tag clouds.
June 22, 2005 at 11:48am by Jeff M.
Maybe "long tail" is a new concept in the myopic tech world, but insurance companies have used that term for decades. It is used to describe liabilities that emerge over a long period of time, environmental liabilities in a business insurance policy, for example. Could it be that someone from what used to be called the "new economy" actually learned something from what used to be called the "old economy"?
June 22, 2005 at 12:49pm by Alan
Interesting point, Jeff.
Chris' third point -- "be a filter" -- reflects an important lesson of the Internet: It kills brokers, but it loves editors. It's one reason blogs have become so popular: I no longer need someone to broker, say, the news, to me ... I can go find it myself. But given the volume of information out there, I could sure use a good editor: someone who understands the market of information on the one hand and what's relevant to me on the other, and based on both, says "here's something you should see."
Just as you've done here, Scott.
Same holds true for stock brokers, travel agents … really any role that used to serve as a broker of information. Stock brokers used to know the price of an equity, and that's why I'd call: to learn the price and make a trade. Now I can do both on my own. In this world, a stock broker has to add different value: as an editor, as a consultant, as an advisor … but more than just price and execution.
This is also a big part of the rumblings blogs have brought upon journalism: with global news sources available at the click of a mouse, the local paper has to add different value. What that value is (and how many can profitably supply it) is the challenge for newspapers around the world.
I go on. Thanks for the post Scott, and please follow-up with more on what Chris had to say.
June 22, 2005 at 12:53pm by Alan
Tricky, that post button ...
June 22, 2005 at 3:21pm by Heath Row
That's why we include the following text just above the Post button: "Please Post your comment only once. Clicking on Post more than once may result in multiple postings. If your comment doesn't appear immediately, please reload the page in a few minutes."
Just hit Post once, and you'll be OK.
June 22, 2005 at 7:21pm by Alan
Yeah. As a savvy MovableType installer and user, I should know better ...
June 23, 2005 at 1:28am by Alex Rowland
Chris has never said that the long tail was a new phenomenon. Power Law distributions are everywhere (although Jeff's example is a stretch). All he is saying is that in the media world, which has been traditionally dominated by scarcity in the supply chain, new technologies and the rise of the Internet has driven the cost of production and distribution down to a point at which long tail content can actually reach consumers.