Reading The Long Tail has been one of the most embarrassing reading experiences of my life. Chris graciously sent me a review copy a long, long, long time ago and it was only now that I managed to finish the book. This incredible slowness has nothing to do with the book itself, though knowing the concept from the original article did deter speedy reading somewhat.
Now, most everyone knows something about the Long Tail, so I won’t get into the details here. If you don’t, Chris Anderson’s blog and the Wikipedia entry for Long Tail are good places to get acquainted with the concept itself.
As some of the key concepts of the long tail is abundance and infinite choice, one of the most interesting points that I came across in the book was the debunking of the legendary consumer behavior study which seemed to say too much choice was confusing and, as such, a bad thing. Of course, while vast amount of choices may force us to actually stop and think what we really want (which, while cognitively more stressful, may not be such a bad thing), an obvious thing comes to our rescue here – recommendation systems. Amazon is already very good at this. In short, more choice is generally much better than less choice but more choice has to be balanced with appropriate support systems for us to take advantage of it.
There’s also this insightful quote from David Foster Wallace which is easily expandable to other domains:
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
And this is the crux of scarcity – if a medium is scarce, it is naturally filled with content appealing to peoples generic interests, as broad a mass as possible. Yet these generic interests are not the only interests people have. All of us are also interested in a number of niche topics, some of them very obscure from most others’ perspective and thus not profitable enough to provide content over the mass media channels. Now that technology has enabled us to create global communities around such niche topics and provide us with “tailored” services to our specific tastes, is it any wonder that we tend to diss the mass media and it’s now very small partial “fit” with our desires? If something is a 90% hit instead of a 40% hit, which am I more likely to choose?
One wrongly interpreted message of The Long Tail is that the “hits” (i.e. the head) would somehow be doomed – they’re not. People will still want to watch blockbusters, read popular books etc – they’re still enjoyed and mass media is still needed to get some common cultural and social discussion topics. The fact that I might occasionally like to feed my niche interests doesn’t mean I suddenly completely stop feeding the generic interests. It’s “just” a shift of balance, but it’s a shift of vast significance.
Now, how about the book itself? It’s a good book of a very important and often at least partially misunderstood concept. That alone earns it a highly recommended mark. As such, if you don’t really fully understand the Long Tail concept and all its implications, read this book to get the insight from the “source”. Whether it really would take 200+ pages to explain all of this is questionable, so while short, the Long Tail the book is a bit too long and at times repetitive.
