Monday, October 09, 2006
5 reasons not to bother with The Long Tail
This is such old blogosphere news, but I have just this one chance to save you from a £17.99 lump of dead tree that you really don't need:
1. You know this stuff already. If you are here, reading a blog, and a distinctly d-list blog at that, you are already consuming media from deep in the long tail. Assuming you regularly browse the ol' b-sphere, you are already familiar with the central claim: that wide choice of media and products promoted by the internet, has widened consumer uptake of niche media and niche products. If you still need an update The Long Tail Blog, has everything for free.
2. The book really is as simple as that. It's padded out with a stack of fun stats about amazon, netflix, and rapture, but the central idea is never really substantiated beyond that. It's an extremely light read. I knocked back my copy in a shade under 2 hours, mostly while I was waiting for a plane to leave Heathrow. The concept is so simple, that it hardly demands your attention.
3. New York Magazine accused Chris Anderson of "laying out the whole argument in the subtitle". The UK subtitle ("How endless choice is creating unlimited demand") is better than the US subtitle ("How the future of business is selling less of more"), but they're both wrong for two reasons. Firstly Anderson never really shows that wider choice has increased demand. It's obvious that wider choice has diversified consumption, but seems unlikely that it has actually changed the pattern of what we want to consume. Before the internet, I certainly hankered after stuff I couldn't find. I wasn't able to download back issues of Grand Royal Magazine, but that's not to say my demand for it was sated by reading back issues of the NME.
4. The second major flaw, along the same lines, is that Anderson doesn't prove either that this is in any way a new, emerging, or universal phenomenon. He tries to draw together some principles for "21 century Long Tail businesses", presumably to sell more copies, but his own examples let him down. Sears & Roebuck exploited the "long tail" long ago. Online grocers like tesco.com, are currently hugely successful without needing to exploit it.
5. Like all pop-science books there's always an obvious counter-example to every example put forward. Anderson spends a long time trying to justify Wikipedia as "Long Tail", grossly stretching his overworked idea. However the OED is, like the Wikipedia, in part created by unpaid volunteers who look for early uses of every English word. The OED also uses a team of expert lexicographers to oversee that work. OED is not just "long tail", in its production methods, but in its content: it contains more words than any other dictionary. However is no other sense does it conform to what Anderson thinks of as "long tail": it's authoritative, it's mainstream, and it's 150 years old. When confronted with this diversity of "long tail" characteristics, the idea starts to seems incoherent.
So, from deep in the heart of the media long tail, I'm pleading with you not to bother buying The Long Tail. If you still feel you have to read it, I'd suggest doing something very long tail, and waiting for the inevitable e-book torrent.
1. You know this stuff already. If you are here, reading a blog, and a distinctly d-list blog at that, you are already consuming media from deep in the long tail. Assuming you regularly browse the ol' b-sphere, you are already familiar with the central claim: that wide choice of media and products promoted by the internet, has widened consumer uptake of niche media and niche products. If you still need an update The Long Tail Blog, has everything for free.
2. The book really is as simple as that. It's padded out with a stack of fun stats about amazon, netflix, and rapture, but the central idea is never really substantiated beyond that. It's an extremely light read. I knocked back my copy in a shade under 2 hours, mostly while I was waiting for a plane to leave Heathrow. The concept is so simple, that it hardly demands your attention.
3. New York Magazine accused Chris Anderson of "laying out the whole argument in the subtitle". The UK subtitle ("How endless choice is creating unlimited demand") is better than the US subtitle ("How the future of business is selling less of more"), but they're both wrong for two reasons. Firstly Anderson never really shows that wider choice has increased demand. It's obvious that wider choice has diversified consumption, but seems unlikely that it has actually changed the pattern of what we want to consume. Before the internet, I certainly hankered after stuff I couldn't find. I wasn't able to download back issues of Grand Royal Magazine, but that's not to say my demand for it was sated by reading back issues of the NME.
4. The second major flaw, along the same lines, is that Anderson doesn't prove either that this is in any way a new, emerging, or universal phenomenon. He tries to draw together some principles for "21 century Long Tail businesses", presumably to sell more copies, but his own examples let him down. Sears & Roebuck exploited the "long tail" long ago. Online grocers like tesco.com, are currently hugely successful without needing to exploit it.
5. Like all pop-science books there's always an obvious counter-example to every example put forward. Anderson spends a long time trying to justify Wikipedia as "Long Tail", grossly stretching his overworked idea. However the OED is, like the Wikipedia, in part created by unpaid volunteers who look for early uses of every English word. The OED also uses a team of expert lexicographers to oversee that work. OED is not just "long tail", in its production methods, but in its content: it contains more words than any other dictionary. However is no other sense does it conform to what Anderson thinks of as "long tail": it's authoritative, it's mainstream, and it's 150 years old. When confronted with this diversity of "long tail" characteristics, the idea starts to seems incoherent.
So, from deep in the heart of the media long tail, I'm pleading with you not to bother buying The Long Tail. If you still feel you have to read it, I'd suggest doing something very long tail, and waiting for the inevitable e-book torrent.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]