[HN Gopher] Where did the long tail go?
___________________________________________________________________
Where did the long tail go?
Author : jger15
Score : 228 points
Date : 2022-06-26 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedgioia.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedgioia.substack.com)
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| 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
| fweimer wrote:
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| "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.
| hoseja wrote:
| Here's a guy restoring vintage mechanical watches as a hobby,
| with over 600 patrons:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/WristwatchRevival
| dixego wrote:
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| AvE is awesome... I have zero idea why he ends with keep your
| * in a vice, though.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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(
| 0898 wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| > 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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.
| nindalf wrote:
| 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.
| redmen wrote:
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's a different model of consumption.
|
| Systems based on votes 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 only recognizes and pushes
| up those who knows how to be popular and not experts or
| creators. It regurgitates commonality.
|
| There's other ways. You can for instance, find a movie you
| like then see what studio made it, the director involved, the
| whatever - sound engineer, then browse out from there. It's a
| version of the Monty Hall problem where you go "let's only
| pay attention to 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
| other students guess on a translation and assign the fluent
| instructor's answer the same weight.
|
| No really, that's how we've structured most content curation
| on the internet. Exactly like that.
|
| It's fine for general purposes but completely fails for the
| narrowband - naive equal democracy and systems weighted in
| popularity are terrible institutions where specialized
| expertise is desired because it occludes expert knowledge
| systems and networks and swaps it out for popularity systems
| and tribes
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| A weird one is watching people fix the hooves on horses,
| something about is captivating.
| addicted wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| Gimpei wrote:
| 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.
| cs137 wrote:
| _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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| 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?
| cheriot wrote:
| 100% agreed
|
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| soderfoo wrote:
| 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.
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| >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.
| twiceaday wrote:
| 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
| wrp wrote:
| 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.
| YeezyMode wrote:
| This is beautiful.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| incrudible wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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/ )
| mattmanser wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| 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 !
| mcv wrote:
| 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.
| moate wrote:
| 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).
| sitkack wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| tgflynn wrote:
| If AWS is as profitable as he says there must be a huge
| opportunity in offering lower cost cloud infrastructure.
| fweimer wrote:
| 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?
| encoderer wrote:
| 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.
| kristianc wrote:
| 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.
| fourthark wrote:
| Mid tail
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| soneca wrote:
| > _" 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| zuminator wrote:
| 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?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| mindvirus wrote:
| 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.
| zumu wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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.
| syntheweave wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > You can not make a decent living playing live medieval
| tavern music on Twitch
|
| Typo? Did you mean "now" rather than "not"?
| olalonde wrote:
| To add to your examples, there are now a bunch of independent
| content creators making a living from platforms like YouTube,
| Twitch, OnlyFans, etc.
| XCSme wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| jrmg wrote:
| The irony of writing an article about the long tail being a myth
| on a niche substack blog...
| hamiltonians wrote:
| same for:
|
| 10,000 hours
|
| grit/growth mindset
|
| 1000 true fans
| [deleted]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Netflix and Disney are the head. TikTok and YouTube are the tail.
| The head may be bigger, but the tail is certainly thriving.
| aaron695 wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| 419?
| aaron695 wrote:
| njharman wrote:
| > "The Internet Perceives Censorship as Damage and Routes
| Around It"
|
| That's true and actually happened. What was (and still is)
| naive 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.
| tharne wrote:
| 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.
| crmd wrote:
| 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.
| hamstergene wrote:
| 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".
| lumost wrote:
| 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.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| 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.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| 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.
| mola wrote:
| 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.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| iandanforth wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| jollybean wrote:
| Yes, but it's a much longer and flatter tail.
| bricemo wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > 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!
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| 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.
| hamburglar wrote:
| > [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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| throwk8s wrote:
| 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."
| cs137 wrote:
| _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.
| uwuemu wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| mypalmike wrote:
| 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.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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...
| benreesman wrote:
| 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| 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...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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).
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| In NYC a typical bar-band gets one free bear per player,
| sometimes not even that.
| achenet wrote:
| What type of bear? Polar bear? Grizzly bear?
|
| just kidding, I'm almost sure you meant beer ;)
| newsclues wrote:
| Are those content creators being fairly rewarded?
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Icathian wrote:
| 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.
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| 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.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 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?
| notatoad wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| mcv wrote:
| 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?
| tgflynn wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| bjourne wrote:
| 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.
| woopwoop wrote:
| I've never heard of this person, but I read most of their
| article. Kind of defeats their point, no?
| ggambetta wrote:
| 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.
| pnf wrote:
| 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.
| kromem wrote:
| 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.
| quadhome wrote:
| 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!
| fullshark wrote:
| 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.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| Disney -- They acquired the rights to Rocky and Bullwinkle (and
| Betty Boop, too, IIRC) simply to eliminate competition from the
| long tail.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| 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 Super Sus would have
| even been possible a quarter century ago.
| mch82 wrote:
| 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.
| mch82 wrote:
| 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).
| pixelbro wrote:
| 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_.
| mch82 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mch82 wrote:
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| The long tail is always temporary - a cambrian explosion followed
| by a bottleneck that picks the winners, and the next cycle begins
| bambax wrote:
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| hintymad wrote:
| > 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| sumy23 wrote:
| 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.
| radley wrote:
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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
| ouid wrote:
| My crotchety take on this is that basically anything worth
| consuming has remained that way excelusively by not being
| profitable.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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?
| njharman wrote:
| Almost everyone. But very few of them will notice the same
| things are missing.
|
| That is the very definition of the long tail.
| njharman wrote:
| 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.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
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