[HN Gopher] Where did the long tail go? (2022)
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Where did the long tail go? (2022)
Author : nickwritesit
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-06-13 14:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.honest-broker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.honest-broker.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| https://search.marginalia.nu knows where some of it went...
| whorleater wrote:
| If we buy into the fact that we can account for "culture" onto
| this distribution, this article assumes that the distribution has
| remained the safe size and shape, and so he draws the conclusion
| that the long tail is declining or disappearing.
|
| But the nature of the long tail is that it is comprised of a
| series of outliers. To use the author's analogy, what might be
| happening is that there's a distributional shift occurring at the
| same time the general amount of "stuff" under the curve is
| increasing, which gives the appearance that things have become
| more alike, even though what has actually happened is that the
| bump has just gotten bigger.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Some of my favorite things found online are old scanned
| engineering reports from before absolutely everything came out of
| a PC. These are definitely on the long tail.
|
| For example: https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/state-of-the-
| art/2/2.p...
|
| Of course these aren't easy to find, and it's only through
| specific searches that a hidden away scanned pdf put through OCR
| can be found. It would be great if there was more of a movement
| to scan all this material and put it online.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Just one more example of the Long Tail to add to the pile:
|
| I'm a tabletop roleplayer (have been one for over 4 decades). I
| have more content legally available to me now than I ever have
| before. I've recently bought (ebook) copies of obscure RPG
| material from the 70s that I've been looking for for years. I can
| easily find quality content for current RPGs (like D&D 5E) even
| if it's extremely nich, and simultaneously and I buy great _new_
| material explicitly written for for AD &D's First Edition!
| saurik wrote:
| This author isn't fundamentally confusing two entirely different
| points.
|
| The first is the idea that, as a marketplace for goods, there are
| a lot of--maybe (if you go all in on the premise) even the
| majority of--sales to be made within the long tail. Maybe you
| believe the 80/20 split the author here posits is a good reason
| to discard the 20%... I think that's dumb and I think that both
| Amazon and Spotify are constantly cited somehow in this article
| as doing something _wrong_ demonstrates as much.
|
| But... the article spends most of its time moralizing about a
| very very different idea: a totally BS claim that anyone who
| believes in the long tail ever promised that if someone allocates
| their effort to making a product for a niche audience that _they_
| will make a bunch of money because "the blockbuster is in
| decline" not merely in total sales volume (due to the relatively
| new accessibility of the long tail) but is somehow a _worse bet_
| than making a niche product for a small audience.
|
| That is not only not the case in practice it is actually
| trivially not the case from the very idea of the long tail: every
| product on the long tail isn't making many sales by definition of
| where they are in the distribution. At one point this author
| finally states as much... but somehow it is _against_ the long
| tail people, as this idea that people should go out of their way
| to _make_ content for this segment was attributed to them as the
| most disingenuous form of strawman throughout the rest of the
| article : /.
|
| The long tail argument is merely that if you sell a bunch of
| stuff that a non-negligible amount of your sales comes from the
| long tail, not that the long tail is somehow itself fat and that
| the people making those products are going to ever manage to pull
| off a bunch of sales. If it is wrong, it is because people might
| want it to be a majority and not just "a lot", but FWIW in my
| experience 20% is "worth it", and if I went to a supermarket that
| only stocked the 10 most popular foods I'd find a better
| supermarket even if 80% of my purchases and 80% of their sales
| are from those 10 foods: it is really hard to run a business that
| only serves blockbusters.
|
| But... is it sane to allocate a bunch of time and money to making
| something that isn't a blockbuster if your goal is to maximize
| profit? Of course not, and no long tail advocate ever claimed as
| much! If you're concerned about where all that content comes from
| --and I can tell you this as someone who ran a very popular and
| even culturally-relevant content marketplace--it is largely
| people working on low _or even negative_ budgets and for whom
| even a single sale is a life-altering moment.
|
| But like, if you take a percent of that person's one sale and you
| add it to the numerous other peoples' one sales, does it add up
| to "a lot" of money? Without even having to chime in with my own
| experience, we can actually note that even this author seems to
| claim--by their assertion in 80/20 or (later) 75/25--you could
| increase your revenue by 25-33% by bothering to open up your
| catalog... and that's even more the "I don't bother to shop at a
| supermarket where I can only find 90% of what I want"!
|
| The author thereby needs to stretch pretty far to explain away
| why markets like Spotify and Amazon disagree with the article,
| claiming that Spotify is I guess just wrong and will likely
| change their strategy in the future once they realize this author
| is smarter than them and that Amazon makes most of their money on
| AWS and so (supposedly) isn't a relevant data point... maybe it
| would surprise the author, then, to learn that Apple iTunes also
| allows pretty much everyone to list their tracks (and thereby
| contains an _extremely_ long tail that certainly doesn 't make
| people a lot of money but which absolutely helps cement them as a
| go-to destination to buy and collect music) and that, while
| Walmart has to make some tough decisions on shelf space, they
| have an extremely expansive online-only catalog.
|
| The only example they have of a _marketplace_ (as the idea that a
| movie producer concentrates on blockbusters is not relevant to
| the premise) shrinking their content catalog is Netflix, and that
| 's not at all Netflix's conscious strategic decision: they only
| were able to have all of that content for so long because the
| people who owned it didn't want to directly compete with Netflix
| and were willing to license it "on the cheap"... now that they
| all want their own streaming service, they are clawing back their
| interests region by region, and it frankly isn't clear that the
| gutted separate services are going to manage to sustain their
| users as well as the unified market could (which I will claim is
| in no small part due to long tail effects; their best strategy
| will likely be to re-form the old cable market by joining forces
| under a single subscription).
|
| I'm honestly not sure why this article has managed to captivate
| so many people given how mixed up it is in the premise, but I
| hope that readers spend some time really thinking about not only
| whether the points made in this article resonate in the order
| presented but whether they manage to correctly lead to the moral
| and economic conclusions they purport to before anyone ascribes
| to "the long tail" something only this author incorrectly
| understood and start--as I have seen many do--using it to justify
| actively shrinking a catalog or the idea that a large catalog
| isn't somehow a powerful moat (which someone tried to use against
| me once to claim how easy they thought it would be for just
| anyone to compete with Spotify).
| barcode_feeder wrote:
| Such a weird, bad take.
|
| I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It
| has NEVER been more accessible.
|
| I am very interested in a rather niche subcategory of tea. It has
| NEVER been more accessible.
|
| Art house cinema, indie videogames, bespoke accoutrements... you
| get where I'm going with this.
|
| This author is the reason the Long Tail is not flourishing. This
| author is content with Netflix and Spotify. This author is the
| problem.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I am very interested in outsider /experimental/extreme
| music. It has NEVER been more accessible._
|
| That's orthogonal to a long tail discussion though, which is
| about the distribution of streams (how many views/streams go to
| a small part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail),
| not their mere availability.
| jsiva wrote:
| Platforms such as Etsy, Gumroad and ironically Substack are
| significantly (if not totally) targeted towards the long tail. An
| argument can be made that these platforms are not successful
| enough to justify serving the long tail, but the author started
| the article with concern for counterculture and then ties
| widespread financial success as a metric for healthy
| countercultures. A better metric would be the amount of viable
| lifestyle businesses operating within cultural niches but no data
| on this is present within the article.
|
| The author makes several references to a consulting project where
| they also state that serving niches is not viable, this is
| probably true for whatever client was looking to branch into
| this. With the provided examples, the article reads as a defense
| of those previous findings.
| fullshark wrote:
| The long tail of movies/TVs is youtube. The long tail of music is
| soundcloud. These content creators are using platform revenue +
| Patreon and tiny production costs to survive as basically
| hobbyist endeavors in many cases.
| gspencley wrote:
| What worries me is that it is becoming more and more difficult
| to find the long tail on Youtube (I don't use Soundcloud so
| can't comment there).
|
| Youtube's search has become useless (to the point where it has
| become a meme that people are now using non-Youtube search
| engines to search for content on Youtube), and its
| recommendation algorithm is designed to promote what is popular
| (the short-tail).
|
| It's still possible to create a new channel on Youtube that
| offers something different, of course. It's just harder to get
| visibility on that content because the same "chase the short-
| tail, ignore the long-tail" strategy is starting to find its
| way into how modern search engines behave as well.
|
| I used to disagree with the claim that if you didn't rank in
| the top 5 search results you didn't rank at all. My
| disagreement was based on the fact that I earned a living from
| a website that received most of its traffic from organic search
| results. These days though, I think that's becoming more and
| more true based on how search engines present results to the
| user.
| crazygringo wrote:
| My experience is to the contrary -- I watch a bunch of niche
| comedian channels and niche engineering channels and my home
| page is full of recommendations for them.
|
| Once YouTube learns your interests, if you have long-tail
| tastes, it gives you long-tail content. It's recs absolutely
| _are not_ designed to promote popular stuff, unless you 're
| logged out and it simply doesn't know your interests.
|
| Also I don't know what you mean about YouTube search being
| useless. Not only does it search titles and descriptions but
| also transcripts. I've never not been able to find something.
| williamcotton wrote:
| YouTube seems to have some sort of multi-armed bandit
| approach going on because I'll frequently be presented with a
| topical video with few subscribers and few views on my home
| feed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One trouble w/ the long tail as a business is that people who are
| interested in the "long tail" have a huge amount of old content
| that they can enjoy. For instance I am still discovering old
| groups like Yellow Magic Orchestra.
|
| I despise the "classic rock" format where you will hear the same
| tired song in the morning and evening drive time every day, there
| is a show on a local college station that plays "classic rock" B
| sides, obscure tracks, bands that sound like "classic rock" bands
| you know but did not get so famous. The DJ apologizes if he plays
| any track he played in the last six months.
|
| Today my thing is anything that is recorded in a surround format
| be that traditional Chinese music or 2000s electronica or
| remnants from the 1970s quad era.
|
| New music that appeals to the short tail has to get my attention
| through all that.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > The DJ apologizes if he plays any track he played in the last
| six months.
|
| This is nothing. Back in Aichi Prefecture I had a neighborhood
| pirate DJ-cum-Yakuza errand boy who would cut off a finger
| every time his MD player skipped!
| baxtr wrote:
| The entire internet is the long tail. Heck, HN is a pretty long
| long tail!
|
| I sometimes wish we could go back in time to when you could only
| reach people by landline and there were only two TV channels.
| alexpotato wrote:
| I think this is ignoring that something that pops up in the Long
| Tail can go viral and become a block buster.
|
| One example from the days of the origin of the Long Tail was
| Bollywood movies.
|
| There aren't enough fans of Bollywood in one geographic location
| to warrant dedicating a whole theater to a showing. (I'm ignoring
| regional pockets, of course).
|
| However, if a movie gets lot of views online, that might boost it
| up the tail into the attention of more casual fans. In turn, they
| might boost-like it into more mainstream etc.
|
| That was much more difficult in the past where even if there was
| a lot of word of mouth praise, you still had the geographic
| distances.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This article is not supported by the data provided.
|
| The first major example is about the availability of TV shows and
| movies on Netflix, but this isn't a reflection of _consumption_
| at all, or even of Netflix. Movies went down because other
| studios pulled their movie content. But it also shows that TV
| shows _quadrupled_ from 530 to 2,108. That 's big-time long tail
| _increase_.
|
| The next example is about more sequels in theaters, but theaters
| have never exhibited long-tail characteristics to begin with, so
| that's irrelevant.
|
| Then it goes on to Spotify and admits that it _hasn 't_ reduced
| its long tail, but says he "wouldn't be surprised". That's not
| evidence -- that's nothing. Then he claims that long-tail artists
| can't make a living on Spotify -- but the long tail has _never_
| been about content creators making money, that would be
| nonsensical in the long tail. It 's always been about the
| _platform_ making money from it.
|
| Then he finally moves to a fast-food restaurant and discovers
| that loyal customers make up most of revenue. Which, once again,
| has nothing to do with "long tail" because the long tail is about
| _products_ , not _customers_.
|
| He finally concludes:
|
| > _We live in a Short Tail society. And it's getting shorter all
| the time._
|
| Yet provides zero evidence for this, and it's easily refutable
| just by looking at television. We used to all watch the same
| shows, now we all watch different shows. It's common to mention
| your favorite show and not only has your friend/coworker not
| scene it, they've never even _heard_ of it. Same with your
| favorite band, same with your favorite author. Total available
| content has _exploded_. We live in a Long Tail society.
| majormajor wrote:
| Yeah, the long tail on Spotify is longer than the music long
| tail has been EVER. I bounce between literally hundreds of
| artists in a year, per their stats. I was never doing that
| twenty years ago with CDs and mainstream radio.
|
| Same with mainstream movies + 4 broadcast networks + a few
| premium cable channels compared to _all that plus all the
| streaming stuff, all the stuff on Youtube, etc_. Hardly
| anything gets the population share of viewers that something
| like I Love Lucy or Mash or Friends used to get.
|
| Indie video games, blogs, self-published novels, the list goes
| on and on and on and on.
| coldtea wrote:
| Long tail/"short tail" paradigm is about the distribution of
| purchases/views/streams etc. A statistical property, not about
| mere quantity.
|
| So not about whether there were 530 TV shows that were
| increased to 2,108, but whether the distribution of watching is
| wider or more like a power law.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Long tail/"short tail" paradigm was about the distribution
| of purchases/views/streams etc. A statistical property, not
| about mere quantity.
|
| From Wikipedia for I Love Lucy:
|
| "The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired
| on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a then-record rating of
| 71.7, meaning that 71.7% of all households with television
| sets were tuned to the program, the equivalent of some 44
| million viewers.[71] That record is surpassed only by Elvis
| Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show,
| which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million
| viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[71] The overall rating of 67.3
| for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the
| highest average rating for any single season of a TV
| show.[72]"
|
| MASH: "The series premiered in the US on September 17, 1972,
| and ended on February 28, 1983, with the finale, showcased as
| a television film, titled "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen",
| becoming the most-watched and highest-rated single television
| episode in US television history at the time, with a record-
| breaking 125 million viewers (60.2 rating and 77 share)"
|
| By the time we get to something like Friends we're down to
| 52M live viewers for its finale, and it's only shrunk since
| then. Netflix doesn't give equivalent counts or US-only ones,
| as far as I can find, just "at least two minutes within N
| weeks" type stuff and similar; I believe if they had that
| level of cultural ubiquity, they'd be shouting it to the
| rooftops more explicitly.
|
| If you look at ticket sales counts instead of box office for
| movies you'll see a similar large representation of older
| stuff, and that's a quantity comparison even with a smaller
| population to boot .
| coldtea wrote:
| Many here seem to confuse "availability of more content" with the
| "long tail".
|
| The "long tail" concept about content, as made famous in the 00s
| by Chris Anderson's best-seller, is about the distribution of
| content consumption, not it's mere availability.
|
| Basically about how many views/streams go to a small ("popular")
| part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail.
|
| Having more content available (or some people watching less
| popular stuff) is required but not sufficient property to have a
| long tail effect.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| You are still free to [create your own
| economy](https://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-
| Prosperity/dp...)
| moffkalast wrote:
| Step 1: Charge everyone $30 for a book.
|
| Step 2: ????
|
| Step 3: Profit.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| The book is just a means to an end. I mention it as a summary
| of the idea that life is best when you make your own economy
| by making the internet work for you. A world of culture
| tailored to your preferences is available to those that want.
|
| For example, all the indie music is on Soundcloud and
| Bankcamp, not on Spotify.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _Where did the long tail go?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883206 - June 2022 (208
| comments)
| colinsane wrote:
| anyone dealing with money should understand that the systems of
| coordination centered around money constitute the short-tail of
| all such systems. the conclusion of this piece leads me to
| believe the author understands this intuitively, but just hasn't
| put that into words yet. to lament that the long-tail of culture
| and production is supported via the long-tail of
| social/coordination systems is to lament that the long-tail is
| _pervasive_.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| It happens in videogames. Digital media is perfect for this
| business model.
|
| Yeah everyone knows Call of Duty, they sell like 20 million
| copies right?
|
| But then there is a game series called Atelier which has been
| around since the late 90s and they sell to a dedicated audience
| of sometimes literally less than 100k. And these games are
| expensive.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/9121/Atelier_Arland_se...
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