The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More - Chris Anderson
Imagine a sales chart with a line that starts at the uppermost left corner and then curves slightly to the right until it drops rapidly and then peters out into a long tail that extends off the right-hand side of the chart. The far left side is the “head” and it represents “hits” – high volume items that sell in mass quantities. The long curve or the “long tail” (which gradually descends to the bottom, but never quite hits it) represents an endless amount of miscellaneous “niche” items.

Our tendency is to assume that the “hits” matter and the “misses” are irrelevant. “It’s human nature to see things in absolutes and extremes, black or white, all one thing or all another – hits or misses. But of course the world is messy, gradated, and statistical. We forget that most products aren’t big sellers, because most of the ones we see on the shelves do indeed sell in huge numbers, at least compared to those that didn’t make it to the store in the first place. Yet the vast majority of virtually everything, from music to clothing, is at best only modestly popular. Most things fail the hit test, yet somehow they continue to exist. Why? Because the economics of blockbusters is not the only economics that works. Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air” (167).

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson sheds light on how the long tail is full of marketable treasures. And the nearly infinite stretch of the long tail makes the sales potential of these items a viable profit-making venture. “Hits are great, but niches are emerging as the big new market” (8).

According to Anderson, for too long business theory has been driven by the economics of scarcity. But when companies like Amazon, Rhapsody, Netflix, and iTunes possess a nearly infinite shelf-space, the theory must change. “Seen broadly, it’s clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance – what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone” (11).

Three new forces have made the Long Tail profitable. “The first force, democratizing production, populates the Tail. The second force, democratizing distribution, makes it all available” (107). The third force, accessible filters which help “people find what they want in this new superabundance of variety” (107). And today, filters are becoming ever more sophisticated and precise. Anderson distinguishes between “pre-filters” which predict consumer’s taste before a products hit the market, and thus they are fallible, and “post-filters” which actually measure the taste of the marketplace.

The presence of filters takes the bite out of Barry Schwartz’s argument that too much choice is confusing and oppressive (an argument he champions in The Paradox of Choice). Anderson argues that choice is great if it is manageable, in other words, if an accessible and easy-to-use filter is available to help us wade through our options. He writes, “the solution is not to limit choice, but to order it so it isn’t oppressive” (171).

Because of the new market, Anderson argues that “[w]e must reject the mental traps we fall into because of scarcity thinking” (167). This includes thoughts such as: “If it isn’t a hit, it’s a miss.” “The only success is mass success.” “Direct to video = bad.” “Self-published = bad.” “Independent = they couldn’t get a deal” and “If it were good, it would be popular” (167).

This has significant impact for me in regard to the writing of books – something I would eventually love to do. Just consider the following statistic: “In 2004, 950,000 books out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen BookScan sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. In other words, about 98 percent of books are noncommercial, whether they were intended that way or not” (76). Certainly a good portion of the almost 1 million books that sold less than 99 copies are poorly written, but it is unlikely that they all are. In the same way, not all the blockbusters are necessarily well-written or good simply because they sold well (Left Behind comes to mind). Perhaps in the new emerging market, there is a place for self-publishing without feeling ashamed. (Take that, Maurice!)

Whatever comes, the head and the tail need each other. “Today, our culture is increasingly a mix of head and tail, hits and niches, institutions and individuals, professionals and amateurs. Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass. And niche culture will get less obscure” (182).