Stepping on The Long Tail

As promised, a more in-depth look at Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail . The argument is pretty straight-forward, that the best economic use of the Internet is to offer a wider array of products to a much larger and dispersed audience. However, what Anderson points out, is that Internet based companies are not best at offering a full range of products, from best-sellers to specialized products, but should rather concentrate on the niche sellers.

If you remember your high school math, graphing and limits and whatnot, then the idea becomes easier to grasp. The title of the book comes from the part of the distribution curve that occurs just after the spiky head (high volume bestsellers) drops off. Products in the tail sell fewer and fewer units but it takes a long, long time to reach zero. The aggregate sales of everything in the tail equals or in some cases surpasses, that of the bestsellers.

Anderson wants to extrapolate from this economic model, the idea that we are moving away from a "hit" or celebrity-obsessed culture. The shift towads niche marketing, coupled with cheap digital tools to make digital media, means that more of us could end up being the stars of our own little corners of the world, something that we here at Wenzel would agree with.

Of course, a shiny new Mac and the Internet won't help you build a new car company and The Long Tail is too optimistic about the broader social implications, gushing about a new era of abundance, or "post-scarcity" describing not the allocation of finite resources like cotton, or oil, but rather the availability of physical goods on store shelves. It's a less sophisticated image than the last time we heard those terms in the Sixties. It was a bit of a dream then, and its a bit unrealistic now.