What Everyone Got Wrong About ‘the Long Tail’

The other obvious problem with today’s internet is the economic structure. Chris Anderson wrote a famous essay called “The Long Tail” back in 2004 that predicted the internet would make media businesses less hit-driven and improve the economics for niche creative people. He was right in one sense: the internet created many more niche communities an... See more

Ever since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first published his “Long Tail” theory in 2004, the idea has been endlessly reinforced, contradicted, and debated. He argued that the internet’s removal of physical limitations (local audiences, scarce shelf space) would empower niche products and creators to flourish.

“According to its proponents, the Long Tail would revitalize our culture by expanding the scope of the arts and giving a boost to visionaries on the fringes of society.”

the Long Tail concept refers to businesses that focus on products and services with almost no customers. The basic idea is that you can make a lot of money selling to these microsco... See more

Chris Anderson published his hit book The Long Tail, arguing that the breadth of the Internet made it possible for niche businesses, products, and content to thrive. Popularity was a curve rising exponentially toward the left side of a graph; Anderson predicted that the long, flat part of the curve, with diverse but relatively unpopular things, wou

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But for content platforms, the move to digital content hasn’t been correlated with a burgeoning long tail: the top creators are massively successful, while long-tail creators are barely getting by.

Today almost all creative work is digitized and essentially rented — lowering payouts, devaluing work, and redirecting the lion’s share of rewards to the platforms hosting the work rather than the creators themselves.

In his “1,000 True Fans” essay, Kelly explains that he wasn’t as excited about this new economic model as others seemed to be. “The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people: a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers,” he writes. “But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators.” If yo... See more