The Long Tail and Web 2 Point Something

I was happy to see Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail on our class syllabus, since I already had a copy and that was one less book I would have to buy. Last year I received an advance copy at BookExpo, an event for publishing professionals. How fortuitous that I received a book about the power of niche markets at a conference that appealed to a niche audience.

The Long Tail represents the plethora of choices we now have in the digital age. We no longer have to accept current trends because we have access to an endless library of content. Choices are good, and the enterprising have capitalized on this vast potential. However, rights owners, musicians specifically, are put in a real bind with how their content is consumed. Seamus McCauley’s blog, Virtual Economics, sums it up well: “At the moment, rights-owners find themselves painted into a technological and cultural corner. The very technology that originally made them rich – mass media, and the possibility of bringing mere concert-hall performers to a global audience via mass replication and distribution, has been taken out of their hands by their former audiences.”

Anderson found and expanded meaning from once overlooked data on music track sales, this data seemed ordinary for a physical market, but “where we’d always assumed there was essentially no meaningful demand, the songs are still being downloaded at an average of 250 times a month. And because there are so many of these non-hits, their sales, while individually small, quickly add up” (p. 20).

When Anderson describes the economics of physical space my mind wanders to my company’s book warehouse. Space is a premium, and books that do not sell can quickly get remaindered or worse, the devastating end of a book—pulped! In a digital age, this death is averted and a book that picks up a handful of sales in a year is not considered a risk.

Having helped coin another digital term, Tim O’Reilly demystifies the concept of Web 2.0 in his article “What Is Web 2.0” while also incorporating the Long Tail into the discussion.

Web 2.0 is the succession of advancement made in the years since the “dot-com bubble” burst. Google’s success was due to its ability to “leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web” (p. 4). I was interested in the power of fragmentation and decentralization O’Reilly relates to the success of BitTorrent and other companies. It’s intriguing that our cell phones have evolved into a similarly use of small data packets to effectively produce our calls. Divided up and taken collectively, these packets perform in a more desired way. Similarly, each BitTorrent customer propels utility because they bring their “own resources to the party…harnessing the power of the users themselves” (p. 5). Google and BitTorrent are merely the aggregators who serve as the middlemen to the required data. These bits and pieces merge and taken together create a dominate body of content available to users.

Choices are endless, and it will be interesting to see how companies enhance their applications and boost their content. Because our digital community is likely to play a larger role in their success, it is good to know we will also help influence the shape of the next powerful applications.