Media Updates

The Long Tail

Paul Attallah
October 15 2005

The Long Tail is a way of thinking about trends in media and audience behaviour popularized by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He maintains a blog at www.thelongtail.com. His fundamental argument is that new distribution strategies such as MP3 downloads, Amazon.com, Netflix, etc., have significantly altered the relationship between content providers and audiences.
    For example, television shows are traditionally made to be broadcast over networks at times determined by the networks. The possibilities for seeing the same broadcast more than once, while not non-existent, are relatively limited. Furthermore, the economics of reaching a large audience with a single television show require the marshalling of tremendous resources. Hence, each individual show is very expensive to produce and television comes to rely increasingly on hits to cover its costs. Indeed, as with movies and music, most television shows fail to recoup their costs. Consequently, the entire industry depends upon the few hits that are achieved not only to return a profit but also to cover the expenditures of all the ‘failures’.
    However, when television shows become available for purchase on DVD on for download via the internet an interesting phenomenon occurs. Shows which may have been failures during their network runs find an audience via the new distribution channels and start to return a profit.
    The same phenomenon occurs with movies and with music. Indeed, it may be most striking in the world of book sales. Some books which make little or no impression when they are first published nonetheless reach a surprisingly large and profitable audience through distributors such as Amazon.com. In fact, distributors such as Amazon generate an increasing amount of their profit not from a few big hits but from the supply of innumerable ‘small’ titles.
    As a result, the ‘long tail’ refers to the long trailing part of a sales graphic where more and more profits may be found.
    To be successful, the long tail requires a distributor with a large inventory and a sophisticated search engine. If the search engine allows users to attach comments, this not only increases user loyalty but also allows newcomers and old hands to create new pathways through the inventory. The inventory becomes a type of cultural memory which various users re-order in new and unanticipated ways. The end result is that the users become increasingly sophisticated in their knowledge and use of the inventory.
    The inventory makes the distributor less reliant upon hits and allows overall costs to decline. This is especially evident in Apple iTunes where users may purchase individual songs for 99¢ rather than entire CDs for $20. The revenue stream thus generated derives from multiple sales of relatively-inexpensive individual songs rather than from sales of relatively-expensive CDs.
    This does not mean that hits never happen but that the aggregation of audiences and the success of cultural industries no longer depends so heavily upon them.