What is a blog? The Long Tail: From Mass Markets to Millions of Niches video clip
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
From now on, TheWeblogProject will not only just report on the progress and development of the first open-source movie about blogs and bloggers, but it will also be the chronicle of the open independent media revolution taking place in front of our eyes.
What I particularly want to pay attention to is the emerging changes and trends shaping the new media marketplace and in particular the new opportunities and changes directly affecting the universe of small, independent new media producers, video and film-makers.
A number of key factors are making this revolution possible and are increasingly affecting our way to consume, access and produce video and film-based content. These include:
a) new low-cost hardware and software technologies allowing independent movie-makers to create their own films and programming.
b) cost-effective services providing next to unlimited hosting space and bandwidth costs for independent producers.
c) new ways, modes and devices to access, store, retrieve and play back video content on personal, home and portable media devices.
d) the impact that online content clearinghouses, search engines and human ratings and recommendations have on the whole movie content industry as explained in Chris Anderson' Long Tail.
e) the revolutionary changes that P2P technologies will bring to both traditional broadcasters and small independent movie makers once it is widely realized that there is no more need for ultra-expensive broadcasting hardware, antennas and relay stations when all of this can now be distributed freely by your own audience at no additional costs.
f) powerful technology-based innovations slashing marketing and distribution costs with the adoption of new, more effective channels and approaches: blogs, RSS, P2P, digital downloads (no more printing, storage and shipping costs) etc.
I know, some of this stuff is just too disruptive for being digested without having some weird sensations; the amount of change that we will see in this area is so amazingly vast, that unless you dig, scout and chew all of the signals coming out of the this new emerging universe, it is just too hard to wrap around one's head.
Chris Anderson, Chief Editor of Wired is probably the person that has influenced the most my view and understanding of the independent movie revolution taking place in front of our eyes today and also the one that has better explained why and how this is taking place. Prior to taking over Wired in mid-2001, Chris Anderson was with The Economist for seven years in London, Hong Kong and New York. He is the man behind the Long Tail concept.
Written in October 2004, the seminal article by the same name, which also appeared in the print version of Wired around the world, laid out with abundance of reference data, graphs and supporting stats the evident shift taking place in all markets exposed to the unlimited virtual shelf space offered by the unlimited channel options offered by Amazon, NetFlix, iTunes and all of the similar virtual content clearinghouses. When scarcity of time, physical space, air-time is not anymore dictating who gets to be published, shelved, promoted and seen, everyone gets the opportunity to be a star.
The key difference in a Long Tail market is that in principle each one can have an audience. The Long Tail allows a blooming of genres and styles, and of analog niche audiences that cater around them. Given the new costs of producing music, books and video content, the economics of making a living while being an independent producer change drastically. You only need an audience of a few thousand to start breaking even or making a profit.
Chris Anderson has not only started a blog reporting about the Long Tail phenomenon but he has recently summarized the overall concept in a great, short piece.
I would like to share here his Long Tail 101 as it marks the founding reference for anyone wanting to develop a realistic vision of the future of independent content production in the near future and of the economics and business factors that characterize it.
The Long TailThe theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.
As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.
In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are.
But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio.
In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.
(c) The Long Tail BlogThe term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart above, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.
Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive.
But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude.
Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.
When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought.
People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).
...
The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches.
It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.
As recommended by Chris Anderson himself, the Wikipedia entry on the Long Tail is an excellent information resource expanding further on this topic. Go give it a look.
URL of this article:
http://www.theweblogproject.com/independent_movies/independent_movie_production/the_Long_Tail_concept_summarized_20050920.htm
