16 років тому автор написав про те, як інтернет, здешевлення засобів виробництва і дистрибуції вплинули на людей і бізнес.

В книжці Андерсон пояснює, чому непопулярні (нішові) продукти сумарно приносять роздрібним онлайн-магазинам (і не тільки) прибуток, який часом перебільшує сумарний прибуток від продажу популярних товарів.

Чому «довгий хвіст»? Бо автор якось зобразив криву попиту товарів інтернет-магазину музики Rhapsody і виявилося, що вона має дуже довгий «хвіст». В цьому хвості плентаються сотні тисяч (!) музичних записів, які продаються дуже рідко (часом раз у квартал), але при тому сумарно можуть складати 25-50% прибутку магазинів з таким величезним асортиментом.

Ще Андерсон пояснює у чому проблема досліджень, результати яких показують, що великий вибір вводить людей в ступор і тому великий вибір це начебто погано, і які помилки люди роблять, оперуючи правилом «20/80», і чому майбутнє за появою ще більшої кількості вузьких ніш, і багато всього іншого такого ж цікавого і корисного.

Досі пізнавально, хоча, безперечно, автор не міг у всьому виявитися правим.

How remarkable that this came out in 2006. It predicts the digital economy of today pretty well - laying the groundwork for Spotify, Etsy, Substack, and the rise of the influencer. He even gets within a hair's breadth of Ben Thompson's 'Aggregation theory', nine years before BT did.

Of course it shows its age too. Facebook is nowhere to be found, and Myspace still commands the author's attention. But his fundamentals remain solid (time for a revised and updated edition?)

Filing it under, "wish I had read this when it was released".

Buku bagus untuk memahami bagaimana perusahaan besar saat ini memenangkan kompetisi. Long tail adalah istilah untuk situasi produk yang tidak populer, namun masih laku karena spesifik terhadap minat pembeli. Buku ini menceritakan banyak perusahaan dan teknologi yang padam karena tidak mampu bertransformasi ke bisnis yang menyesuaikan kondisi internet saat ini. 3 Pendukung Long Tail adalah:
Teknologi Produksi, Peran Agregator, Dan Filter. Teknologi produksi artinya semua orang bisa membangun produknya sendiri, apakah itu buku, musik dan video. Agregator adalah perusahaan atau media yang menjembatani konsumen dengan produk itu sendiri. Filter adalah fitur yang disediakan agregator agar produk-produk tidak populer terjangkau oleh konsumen yang lebih spesifik.

Saya kasih bintang 4 karena bukunya masih membuat bingung diawal-awal. Banyak data-data yang sebenarnya tidak penting.

I found this book almost unbearably dull and struggled to get through it. The central concept is interesting enough, but the book runs over the same idea from what feels like a million different angles, exploring the minutiae of each in agonizing detail.

The original article was probably worth a read, but stretching it into a whole book? Nah. No thanks.

If you work in the world of online retail or business, perhaps you'll get more out of this book than I did. (I'm probably in the wrong niche. How ironic.)

The book, and its main idea of the Long Tail, has seriously affected the way I see many industries. When the digital book world started really taking off, after Amazon jumped in, I found myself referring to it in discussions of the future of the publishing industry. The internet has allowed businesses to reach consumers (and for consumers to reach businesses) who fall out of the majority--who "live" in the long tail. An important book in helping understand the effect the internet has had on retail particularly.

Capitalism. Capitalism everywhere. This could have easily been left to a 15 min Ted talk and you'd have got all the main points of it.

Don't bother. If you have been alive sometime past the year 2010, much of what is included in here is passive background noise to your daily life. The democratization of creation on the internet has already proven to be a great thing and also a bullshit lie created by roughly 5 tech companies to skim off the top of all human creation. This is a book for people who want to own the entire graph and not for the ones who live on the long tail. Servers and digital distribution cost upfront money to set up and maintain, but so much of this book is predicated on pretending they don’t.

Hindsight is of benefit here when we see that the algorithmic recommendations Anderson praises have skullfucked the American consciousness so thoroughly and created alternative information systems that encourage violence, fascism, and quack medicine. If those examples are too partisan for you, Google got in hot water for YouTube's algorithm serving child abuse content and Instagram has entire subcommunities dedicated to gore videos that go completely unchecked (because no person truly knows why the algorithm recommends what it does). The companies will not self-correct because they have no incentive to when all engagement is considered equal, if there is one thing this book failed to predict it's the way that the attention economy would monopolize so much of modern existence.

Do I expect a book from 2006 to guess the current situation of 2025? Fuck no, but when the ethos of the book is "Just own Amazon and be the one skimming off the top," I cannot help but be skeptical of its goals. The long tail concept is applied so broadly that it begins to lose all meaning when everything from iTunes, the concept of cities, and Al Qaeda are all described as long tail phenomena. This is the type of horseshit that will quote Karl Marx in order to justify Jeff Bezos's business practices. The irony that I'm writing this on a website he owns is not lost on me.

Книга для предпринимателей - для понятия нишевых продуктов и бестселеров и что из них прибыльней. Я так поняла, автору не мало лет, так как он сравнивает 80-е с нашим годами, и это поднимет не раз ваши брови вверх в недопониманиии..

Но вдруг кто то собирается выпускать продукт какой то и хочет добится успеха - я думаю книга поможет структурировать информацию у себя в голове

Chris Anderson clearly couldn't say more using less... This book could have been resumed in 20 pages instead of 256 pages.

While an older book, somewhat predictive of the future of consumer choices and markets in the internet age. Most of Chris' own predictions turned out to be false, but those he quoted were just so beautifully, sadly right.

Long-winded throughout the middle, this book falls into the classic case of restating its own conjecture over and over again. It's exhausting and somewhat impressive just how many different ways someone can say the same thing with a new anecdote that feels remarkably similar to the previous one.

With some interesting nods towards Pareto and others, The Long Tail wants to be academic, but it often feels like a father orating the same aphorism over and over again during the family vacation.

Started this one last fall after having read the 'Makers' book by the same author. Finished it up in the last couple of days. The information is interesting and evident in our day to day lives. The book was published in 2006 which seems recent, yet some of the references and examples are already outdated or feel irrelevant. However, this reinforces the point of how much impact and the speed at which the internet has changed the business world, our expectations and culture.

This book would've been amazing if I'd read it 15 years ago. I don't want to say that is not relevant nowadays, I think people still talk about the long tail in business, but definitely, the examples are outdated which makes total sense because this book was written a long time ago.

If you're interested in history and understand how and why niches became popular, then this is a great book for that.