Non-fiction 20 Jul 2006 02:11 pm
The Long Tail
The Long Tail
Chris Anderson
This book emerged from an article published in Wired in October 2004, which followed onto a blog while the book was being written (and the blog goes on, of course). The main point, as described in the original article, is that the digital economy and the amazing increase in the amount of choice offered to consumers are ending the era of “hits” and “blockbusters” and allowing consumers to have their most unusual tastes satisfied. This is where the subtitle of the book (”Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”) comes from: instead of selling large numbers of units of a few “hit” products, businesses are increasingly selling less and less units of more and more different products.
The main examples centre around entertainment, as this is an “easily digitised” industry. For example, the amount of music tracks available on iTunes or Rhapsody is much, much larger than what is offered by Wal-Mart, and every single track sells - even if only once or twice a quarter. It may look like selling one unit of a product every three months is not much of a business advantage (especially if you’re not selling 767s, but a product that costs $0.99); but, when you have close to a million different “products”, the amount of money you make on hits will be seriously challenged by the money you make on “non-hits”. Wal-Mart can’t offer this many tracks because it costs too much: each track (actually, each CD) has to earn enough to pay for the space it uses in stores and distribution centres, and thus only the hits get displayed. A digital business does not have this problem.
The book contains several case studies of “long tail” companies (Amazon, Google, Rhapsody, among others), and goes to lengths to show that consumers like choice; every one has non-mainstream tastes, and these are usually not catered for by “normal” retailers. “Long tail” businesses do cater to all tastes, but an important point is made: choice is useless - harmful, even - if the consumer has no way of finding what he wants and assessing its relative quality. Hence the success of recommendation engines such as found in, for example, Amazon.
Chris Anderson, of course, does a much better job of talking about this than I do. The book is very well written, very entertaining and filled with well presented and well analysed data. Like Anil Dash, I had read the original article and had been following the blog, so I was a bit worried that reading this book would simply give me more of the same (or just plain the same); that’s not so. The book nicely complements both the article and the blog, and is essential reading to anyone involved with/interested in business - digital or not.
