From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
This site documents the process and the results.
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Chris Anderson: The Longer Tail
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication.
Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito
Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html
"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.
The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.
Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.
When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).
Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.
1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?
2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?
3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?
The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication.
Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito
Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html
"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.
The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.
Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.
When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).
Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.
1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?
2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?
3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?
The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."
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resistence is fertile
The Long(er) Tail is a steamroller meme with lots of resonance and entirely legible in the context of digital dissemination networks. I'm profoundly nervous by things that seem to absorb lots of phenomenon into a graph. But there are questions wanting here. For instance, what are the consequences for innovation? How does the Long Tail miss comprehending the circulation of culture? What is the limit of The Long Tail? When does it break down or skid off into the bushes? Where are the ethics of The Long Tail, particularly if it's easy to say that insurgency is The Long Tail of warfare? How can The Long Tail sustain itself when we make the safe assumption that the operators/aggregators at the head will behave selfishly to sustain their enterprises' influence, power and economies? What happens when the head (aggregators) eats the tail - why wouldn't that happen so that aggregators can reap more of the sum of the area below the graph? Finally, why do I get nervous that so much fits into that graph there?
Chasing The Long Tail
The strength of the Long Tail (LT) construct is that it brings together many different pieces into a simple, accessible, easy to visualize pattern. Power law distributions have been used for many years to describe physical phenomena such as forest fires, earthquakes, and electric power blackouts. Clay Shirky applied power laws to blogs and social networks in his February 2003 posting http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html that we read earlier this fall. And in his October 2004 Wired article and subsequent work, Chris Anderson makes a compelling case for power law distributions to describe transactions involving books, music, video and other content.
While power laws apply to so many natural and human phenomena, there is no reason to believe they will all have the same exponents and other parameters that define their actual shape. The distributions of forest fires and DVD sales both follow a LT pattern, but combining them on a single chart seems unlikely to add much insight (I haven't tried it, so take this as opinion rather than empirical finding). That is why I think many of us had reservations about insurgency as the Long Tail of warfare.
who wags the long tail?
In seminar, Chris Anderson spoke of the "failure mode" for his theory of the Long Tail being if it's taken as a grand unified theory of everything. If at times during his talk, this seemed to some to be a looming danger, I still left convinced of the broad applicability of the Long Tail as a model for consumer behavior in the age of networked publics.
But another aspect of Anderson's analysis intrigues me. Almost without exception, Anderson is an advocate of the Long Tail as a force for democratization in the market. Indeed it is such in many ways. Consumers have access to a wide range of media. As a teenager growing up in exurban Western Massachusetts, I may have formed a friendly bond with the local bookstore owners and librarians, but I was also perpetually infuriated by the lack of choice available to me. Books on anything out of the ordinary were simply not easy to find. Only a trip to Manhattan and the marvelous Strand Bookstore could put things right, and even then, choices were limited. Today, in contrast, I can find virtually anything I want, no matter how obscure on Amazon.com or bookfinder.com and have it delivered at the lowest available price by the next day. The same goes for music. As a teenager I was at the mercy of extremely limited selections at the local music store and to zombie-like playlists on the radio station. Today I can find anything I want on amazon as well as a huge amount of music immediately ready for download on iTunes. If I want to plug into programming, I can turn to any number of iTunes broadcasts ready to provide whatever genre strikes my fancy.
On the other hand, if the last thirty years or so were virtually defined by the decline of big media and the rise of independent media outlets, I would argue that the Long Tail marks a re-consolidation of big media at the level of the aggregrator. Google, eBay, iTunes, Amazon, and so on are media of a size that the major networks, publishers, and record labels could only have dreamed of. Anderson's response to this observation is that these aggegrators are much more fluid in lifespan. Google displaced Altavista and something may come along to displace Google.
But what interests me isn't the endurance factor of these big aggregators, it's that the Long Tail phenomenon indicates that the post-Fordist culture of choice may be coming to an end. The individualism of the 1968 generation is long gone. People today want to be led, to be members of the (networked) pack, not lone wolves. Take our choice of President, who seems to have no other identifiable qualities apart being a "leader."
Anderson is correct that individuals are interested in cultivating esoteric interests at the right end of the Long Tail, but these interests are adopted through aggregators that are nothing less than the rebirth of big media in new and improved ways. And that's exactly what most people (at least in the US) want.
wagging the dog
To start: I mostly think the long tail is a great meme that captures the shift in industry attention from hits to niche products. The way that the meme has taken off is stunning and says something about how it has worked to capture the economies of attention. I've been shouting about niche popular culture for years, but the long tail is the ideal boundary object for getting broader publics to get it.
My main push-back, which Wally has already picked up on, is the nature of the metrics. Sales figures of commercial content are clearly an important indicator of many things, and one that economists and industry analysts are right to focus on. But as an anthropologist studying non-commercial cultural sharing ranging from mobile phone conversations to fan fiction, I feel like I am looking at similar phenonmena from the other end of the telescope. My head is Chris' tail.
More specifically, if you look at the overall volume of cultural content that we inhabit, consume, and share, commercial content is dwarfed by emails, dinner conversations, phone calls, and IMs. From a person-centered, rather than industry-centered perspective, the tail has always been where the action is - sharing knowledge and culture among people who share your interests and who are close to you. The shift is not so much that there is a tail, but it is entering the sphere of cultural circulation that was previously reserved for commodified culture.
This hit home to me with the slide that Chris had about motivations for participation - where the stuff at the head was for economic motivations where as the stuff at the tail was for psychology. But what does this mean? Is sales figures then an appropriate measure this residual category of non-economic behavioral motivations?
Stimulating ideas and a fun backchannel. More! More!
saturation kinetics
I'll have a longer, more detailed response soon, but I wanted to quickly jot down a few thoughts following the excellent talk, retalk, and back channel. There are a number of things that bother me about the application of power laws to these systems, and I think that a more appropriate model (or at least extension/addendum to the power laws) lies in enzyme kinetics. Specifically, Michaelis-Menten and saturation. Briefly (and again, I'll go into more detail with plots soon), an enzyme is a small "factory" that takes in something (binds substrate, or consumes something), performs a transformation, then releases product (the ultimate remix?). From a kinetic standpoint at low concentrations of substrate, as you increase the substrate, the rate of conversion (consumption) increases. But at some point that rate begins to flatten to a point where increasing substrate has no effect on the rate. This is the saturation point of the enzyme. This is influenced by the binding constant for the substrate (Km) as well as the kinetic constant (kcat).
What I'm saying here is that my hunch is that saturation is a key component in these models that the power law ignores. Or it is buried in the phenomenon, and hence ignored in the analysis. Saturation is dependent on the enzyme (person), as well as the substrate (media or thing being bought/consumed). And other factors such as inhibitors also have an influence, and can affect binding, the reaction, or both.
More soon...
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