A BOOK about how a British climber fought to survive an accident in the Andes has become an unlikely example of a new business phenomenon known as the Long Tail.
Ten years after it had disappeared from bookshops, online booksellers recommended Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void to readers who had bought another book about a mountaineering tragedy. Slowly the book’s sales took off again, demonstrating that there is a market — and money to be made — in the obscure reaches of book and music catalogues.
The term “the Long Tail” was coined by Chris Anderson, and his book on the subject has become the most talked-about business book of the year. The editor of Wired magazine first published his thesis in his magazine in October 2004. An abridged version is reproduced below.
In a period of enormous change, executives at established media giants feel under siege from internet start-ups and an army of tiny new media ventures. The Long Tail seems to offer an explanation of what is happening — and how they can profit from it.
The Long Tail was behind a decision by Universal, the world’s biggest music company, to open up its vaults last February. The company made out-of-print recordings available online from Del Amitri, Eddie & the Hot Rods, Nana Mouskouri, and cultural icons Jacques Brel and Brigitte Bardot.
By October some 250,000 tracks had been downloaded. It might not seem a lot, and it isn’t. Last week alone a single would have had to sell 8,000 copies to make the British top 10. But it’s a lot more than nothing.
Fans of Brel and Bardot can thank Chris Anderson for their new lease of life.
The fact that the newspaper version you are reading is abridged points to the heart of Anderson’s argument. There are no space restrictions online — only the usual restrictions of time and interest.
We live in a era of fragmentation where there are niches within niches. Old-world media — with its fixed numbers of pages, finite TV channels and radio stations — have tended to cater only to the mass market. Big companies traffic in blockbuster films, hit television shows, No1 singles. The big music groups, for example, rely on a tiny number of hits to pay their bills. The niche has been left to fend for itself.
But, said Anderson, the niche is fighting back. The music industry is not producing global hits to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller. On television, hit shows get a fraction of the audience they once did.
Cable television and the internet have enabled people to define their own interests and find and create their own content on blogs or video sites such as YouTube. As the audience fractures, big media face death by a million cuts.
“I always have to laugh when people go on about the threat of consolidation in the media.
I wish,” said Anderson. “I have to compete with 50m blogs and most of them are not commercial at all. What we’ve lost is the monopoly. Now we have to compete with an army of amateurs.”
“In my day job, (editing Wired) I have to concentrate on the hits,” he said.
On the newsstands the magazine is competing for space and must attract the maximum number of buyers. But online Wired has no space restrictions and can afford to take greater chances and address the interests of tiny niches.
“One doesn’t have to displace the other,” he said.
After the original article was published there was so much interest that Anderson decided to write a book. He blogged throughout the writing of The Long Tail, putting up data and receiving feedback from readers online. “Why not do the same at the magazine? Many articles may be better if they are not just a snapshot but take form as a continuing dialogue,” he said.
Wired is part of the Condé Nast group, whose titles include Vogue and The New Yorker. He is currently looking at how to reinvent Wired’s website in the light of The Long Tail.
But the buzz phrase now faces the inevitable backlash.
There have been criticisms of his methodology. One of the most powerful statistics in the original Long Tail article was that more than half of Amazon’s book sales were of titles not among the 130,000 typically stocked by the average Barnes & Noble store, a leading American book chain. However, by the time of the book, this estimate had undergone revision.
Now, Anderson said, about a quarter of Amazon’s sales are from titles outside the top 100,000 stocked by Borders, another big American bookstore chain. Anderson said there had been a mistake with the statistics — but it seems a weakening of The Long Tail message.
An extra 25% of untapped sales is obviously significant. But not as significant as Anderson’s original suggestion that the online market was double the size of the traditional market.
For some, The Long Tail is not a new idea at all. Penguin books’ long tail includes everyone from Aeschylus to Zola. Slow-selling products have always been aggregated but when it comes to making money they have never rivalled the hits.
Anderson said that may well be true for the established media companies but the new players have certainly turned the long tail into real money. “Maybe Universal isn’t going to see a big benefit from the long tail. But look at YouTube — Google bought that for $1.6 billion (£840m),” he said.
YouTube, where users post their own home-made videos and clips they have taken from TV and film, is a perfect long-tail business. Most of its content is worthless to a mass audience. But thanks to its huge archive anyone can find something that interests them by typing their interests into the search box.
The fact that it has been snapped up by Google points to another irony of the long tail. For all the claims of diversity the long tail is currently dominated by a handful of internet giants.
The odds are that a typical consumer uses Google to find information, buys books and CDs on Amazon, buys and sells with Ebay and gets his music from iTunes. In a very short time the long tail has become dominated by a tiny number of firms.
The content they sell is often created by the established media companies. Where would iTunes be without EMI or Warner? But the value of the long tail seems to be largely ending up in the pockets of the new behemoths.
Anderson believes this is just a phase and they, too, will see their lead erased by an army of small players. “You think of Google dominating search but they are not No1 for maps, that’s Mapquest, or blogs, that’s Technorati. This one-size-fits-all model just doesn’t work. It’s very hard right now to be a monopoly.”
Last week Clear Channel, the world’s biggest radio group, announced it was considering going private. The company owns about 1,150 radio stations but is competing with internet and satellite radio. Clear Channel was often criticised for homogenising America’s radio, offering a playlist aimed at the mass market. Now that market is going elsewhere.
“Five years ago Clear Channel looked like the most dominant of all the media companies,” said Anderson. Not any more.
“The mass audience was a false creation of the mass media,” said Jeff Jarvis, media commentator and author of the Buzzmachine blog. “It started in the mid-1950s with television. In America we used to have many voices but when advertisers found they could use television to get a message to a big audience, smaller players were pushed out of the market.”
But that mass audience has been fracturing since people picked up the TV remote control, said Jarvis. “If you give people choice, we will use it. If you don’t, you will lose us.”
