Daniel Fortunov's Blog » The Long Tail

The Long Tail is a recently identified phenomenon in consumer demographics.

Long Tail Boats

The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand is the book that Chris Anderson started with his 2004 article in Wired Magazine (mentioned above). Over the following couple of years he documented progress with the book on his blog, www.thelongtail.com, posting little snippets and thoughts and ideas every so often, before finally releasing the book.

Key Ideas

My summary breakdown of Chris' sophisticated ideas will not do the book justice, and I highly recommend you read it yourself, but I will attempt to summarise the essence of his main ideas here:

1. The New Producers are you and me, and our neighbours and friends. With low-cost consumer electronics, computers and the internet, amateurs are becoming the new professionals. With the ability to create new content and also re-create existing content through mashups and remixes, the long tail is getting fatter every time someone posts a video on YouTube.

2. The New Markets — Aggregators bring together content from head to tail. Amazon is making "out of print" a thing of the past with on-demand printing, and turning individual consumers into used book salesmen, even if for a single title!

3. The New Tastemakers — Filters are needed to cut all the crap out of the long tail and let us find what we are looking for. Google is a perfect filter for the web — every man and his dog put their crap on the Internet these days, and we need good filters to sift out the gold nuggets from the haystack. Filters include search engines, personal recommendations, blogs, and "people who bought this also bought..." recommendations.

In Summary

This is the essence of The Long Tail, as I understand it: The new producers are able to create a bunch of new content. Aggregators bring this to the new markets. Finally, filters drive demand down the tail, taking you from the world you know ("hits") into the world you don't ("niches"); linking supply and demand to lubricate the market.

"The ants have megaphones."