This book is an exploration of how niche markets are on the rise courtesy of better distribution. And that's a gross summary. Much discussion is given to the rise of the digital world and how it's expanded the marketplace so that there can be a Long Tail Distribution (for you statistics nerds out there)--- beyond the major hits, you can continue to sell (for example) less popular items, and lots of them. There are markets within markets.

A very conversationally written book, by the editor of Wired, it taught me a lot I didn't know about the digital age, the blogosphere, etc, and it's a fun read for entrepreneurs.

For some of us it was required reading for a class, but lemme tell you, it beat the hell out of a coursepack!

Far too long. The end of the book was the long tail of The Long Tail. If you get 1/3-1/2 way through it and find you already know the examples he is going to give, you are probably right. In addition, the book is about technology so it is dated--and thus the end can be left unread.

Review:

Summary:
The Internet has ended the economics of scarcity by cheaply enabling the distribution and acquisition of niche items.

Example:

Read:
The Wired article, and then just Chapter 15: The long tail of marketing from this book.

Improvements:
Wish Anderson talked about differentiating between long tail-industries and non-long tail-industries, and how to boost long tails when there should be one but there isn't. Also, what a world would be like in which everything is long tail.

Notes:

Introduction - Our society is still obsessed with hits, but not as much anymore. For example, most of the top 50 all-time best-selling albums are from the 80s and 90s. Think about how different society today is from society twenty years ago -- back then, everybody watched the same handful of TV channels, listened to the same three radio stations, and read the same two newspapers.

The long tail: How technology is turning mass markets into millions of niches - Physical retailers can only carry content when there's enough local demand. So while across the United States millions of people in total would watch Bollywood films in the theater if they could, in each individual city, there is not enough interest to justify putting a Bollywood film on the screen. Similarly, there is only so much radio spectrum and coaxial cable, to carry a limited number of radio stations and TV channels. This is the economics of scarcity; with online distribution and retail making 'shelf space' free, we have the economics of abundance. The average B&N carries about 100k titles; more than 25% of Amazon's sales come from outside its top 100k titles.

The rise and fall of the hit: Lockstep culture is the exception, not the rule - Enter the niche.

A short history of the long tail: From the wish book to the virtual shopping cart - The long tail has even been applied to warfare: traditionally, only nation-states have been able to affect society through warfare; but now, easy access and production of war tools allows for potent gangs (niches).

The three forces of the long tail: Make it, get it out there, and help me find it - The number of niche products is so large that in aggregate they can compete with the hits. The long tail is culture without scarcity; that is, the long tail can only arise if the cost of accessing niches is negligible. Three ways to bring about zero-cost niches are 1) to make it easy for anyone to produce (e.g., the computer allows anyone to make a video or music), 2) to make it easy to receive (e.g., Youtube allows for easy access to videos), and 3) to connect supply and demand by helping consumers find the Tail items they want.

The new producers: Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory - Amateur astronomers can make discoveries, too. In this age we have changed from being passive consumers to active producers. Think of Wikipedia. Self-publishing is more a way to advertise yourself and distribute your message than a way to make money.

The new markets: How to create an aggregator that can stretch from head to tail - Lower the costs of selling. Amazon is a hybrid physical-digital retailer, and as such, can not fully take advantage of the long tail yet.

The new tastemakers: The ants have megaphones. What are they saying? - "We are leaving the Information Age and entering the Recommendation Age." Tastemakers -- people who influence behavior and encourage trying out new things -- are key. Use filters to move people from the safe hits they know to the world of niches they do not, in a personalized route. You need rankings within genres, not across. The long tail is both full of crap and brilliance. A hit is a black swan. Whatever you are looking for, the further down the long tail you go, the more stuff that you are not looking for appears.

Long tail economics: Scarcity, abundance, and the death of the 80-20 rule - Should prices rise or go down further down the tail? It depends on whether you are in a 'want' or 'need' market: in need markets you can raise the price, and in want markets you should lower it (to encourage people to try something new).

The short head: The world the shelf created, for better or worse - Successful long tail aggregators need both hits and niches -- just think of mp3.com for what happens when you don't have the hits. Think of how much better you can target the consumer online -- rather than a can of tuna being in the canned food section, it can be in the, say, 'under $2' section.

The paradise of choice: We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that's a good thing - Eh...

Niche culture: What's it like to live in a long tail world?

The Infinite screet: video after television - How might the economics of abundance change the "half-hour" part of TV shows?

Beyond entertainment: How far can the niche revolution reach?

Long tail rules: How to create a consumer paradise - 1) Make everything available and 2) help me find it. Instead of predicting (pre-filtering), measure and respond (post-filter, e.g., by collaborative filtering).

The long tail of marketing: How to sell where "selling" doesn't work - The best way to market to long tail consumers is to market to the people that these consumers listen to.

Coda: Tomorrow's tail

Epilogue

I think this is going to be interesting... and I was oh-so wrong. The first chapter was great, giving you a new theory to think about and a great new way to approach business.

Then, it turned into the most boring book ever! Chapters 2-infinity (because that's how long the book felt) were regurgitations of the same theory with just a slight twist that made them painful to read.

Read the first chapter of this book and put it down. Better yet, read a summary of the theory and be better off.

The author is the creator of the "long tail" concept, and does an excellent job of explaining the idea and what it might mean for future business, especially retail distribution.

I was disappointed at how dated the material seemed in just 6 years. The concepts still apply, but the specific numbers, percentages, and sites referred to for online transactions are jarringly out of date.

The book revolves around the now well-known fact that online retail provides opportunities for lower demand products (long tail), not possible in brick and mortar stores. This gives that actionable advice that you should make your products available online and consider diversifying your product range to supply the many demands in the long tail. However, his data support is rather limited. He claims to have hundreds of examples; but only mention the giants: Amazon, eBay, Google etc. Hence making bold statements like "the death of industry x" without much evidence.

Ač je kniha hodně stará a vychází z článku, který byl napsán v roce 2004, tak přeci jen byla pro mě více zajímavější než kniha Herd, kterou jsem nedávno četl. Velmi čtivá kniha se spoustou insightů, jenž můžete v jistých podobách uplatnit i dnes.

Nonostante i dati siano un po’ vecchiotti, gli spunti forniti su una lettura diversa del mercato e della vendita di beni e servizi, sono veramente interessanti e fonte di ispirazione.
Chris Anderson ha uno stile di scrittura accattivante, senza orpelli che gradisco particolarmente. Sarà anche che i temi che tratta sono di mio interesse. Resta il fatto che c’è modo e modo. Fondù: argomenti interessanti descritti in modo chiaro. Consigliato!

The book is amazing, it is just outdated, written 12 years ago, before Facebook, twitter, youtube, spotify and netflix.
We are basically living now what he described in the book as what might happen with the development of the long tail.

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson


How the internet engendered the new paradigm of commerce – everything for everyone. With negligible incremental cost of adding SKUs and smart algorithms of search and recommendation, we can indulge ourselves in limitless choice and variety at least in some categories such as music, book, movies, TV shows.

The long tail phenomenon even goes further connecting on and offline, aggregating and pooling information, smoothing out tyrannies of physics.

A really good book of metaphor.

Aged reasonably well! It fell flat on what it expects humans to do in the face of large amounts of unverifiable information (they will adapt!), although maybe it will win out. Well thought out argument for why I should always shop on the internet for specific things than try to find it locally. Influenced my thinking on mybinder.org and other open infrastructure pieces - the long tail of useful things people can do with your software is just as important as the big ticket popular things they do with it. Recommend reading to understand the internet and a dose of early web 2.0 optimism.

232-The Long Tail-Chris Anderson-Business-2006
Barack
2019/08/13
2020/06/24


- hearts of the people who in the world , the business world is also true . A product if able to mobilize the enthusiasm of most of the use of ordinary people , it can be a great success. Taobao allows ordinary people to be shopkeepers . Weibo enables ordinary people to be spokespersons. The WeChat public platform allows ordinary people to be editor-in-chief . Vibrato so that ordinary people can do host . The sum of the creativity of the people is at least equal to the talents of a few talented people . If we can provide ordinary people with creative tools, we can succeed.

"The Long Tail" (The Long Tail), first published in the United States in 2006. This book mainly introduces the development of the long tail market. It believes that the future of business and culture does not lie in the head of “hits” on the traditional demand curve; it is the long tail of “misses” that is often forgotten.

Chris Anderson was born in London, England in 1961. Studied at the University of Maryland, George Washington University. He was the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, a US technology website. After resigning to start a business. Representative works: "Long Tail Theory", "Free: Future Business", "Maker: New Industrial Revolution", etc.

Part of the catalog
1. Long tail market
2. The rise and fall of the big hits
3. The three powers of the long tail
4. New producer
5. New markets
6. New fashion leader
7. Long tail economics
8. The shelf battle
9. Choose heaven
10. Niche culture

Rankings, mainstreams, and big hits have always been things that the general public chased, especially in the era of material scarcity; in this case, individual individual needs and preferences are often forced to give up due to objective conditions.

When the material is greatly satisfied, people are no longer so superstitious about popular and mainstream, and have the ability to pursue and satisfy their own specialization needs, and even a small number of people deliberately seek to be different in order to reflect their own uniqueness. There are so many kinds of niche needs or subcultures, forming a highly exclusive circle. The number of audiences in a single circle may not be large, but the audience groups formed by many such circles may be extremely amazing.

A small circle is a niche market, and it is a gap missed by the big hits with strong versatility . The ceiling of a single niche market may not be high, but when tens of thousands of niche markets are combined together, the overall volume may not be much inferior to the huge body of the hottest, such a market forms a long tail market .

In the industrial age that relies heavily on the physical world, the long-tail market is extremely difficult to meet due to cost reasons. Because of the excessively dispersed demand, in this economic system where physical distance is an important evaluation index, there is almost no demand.

When the Internet appeared, a large number of virtual products and virtual services appeared with the emergence of the information age. The cost of manufacturing, storage, display, and transportation of products has decreased exponentially, which makes the thousands of less popular niche products in the long tail market may also have good input-output ratios, and even exist or even flourish. possibility.

Today we have seen too many such examples, YouTube , Wikipedia , Quora, Facebook, Instagram, Zhihu, Taobao, WeChat official account, Weibo, Douyin and so on. A large number of non-professionals provide a variety of products on these virtual platforms. The vast majority of these products cannot compete with the sophisticated products made by professional teams, but they also have their own small audience. If we put tens of thousands of niche markets add up, you will also find its sum is a monster.

In his book "The World Is Flat", Friedman expressed his emotion that the power of the Internet has gradually equalized the differences and inequalities in the material world. This is very obvious in the process of meeting the needs of the long tail market.

The first is the popularization of production tools. In the past, if you want to generate articles, pictures, and video products, you may need the support of publishers, TV stations, professional film teams, etc., but today, anyone who has only received compulsory education may use the WeChat public platform, Meitu Xiuxiu, Douyin And other production tools to easily produce these products.

The second is the popularization of communication tools. The right to speak has been in the hands of the authorities for a long time. When the Internet gave everyone a big speaker, the era of “self-media” emerged for the first time in human history. This can understand why the authorities have extremely strict control over public opinion.

The last is to connect supply and demand. Information asymmetry is an objective fact that has always existed and will never be eliminated, but the Internet has greatly reduced its asymmetry. In this process, search engines play a vital role, they tirelessly and accurately match the supply and demand markets again and again.

When the author systematically studied the "long tail market" in 2004, many products that we cannot leave today have not yet been born, and the reasons for the vigorous vitality of these products are surprisingly similar in nature. We can even guess that many such products will continue to emerge in the future to meet the needs of more people and more specialized.

"The long tail theory actually explains the economics of abundance—when the supply and demand bottlenecks in our culture begin to disappear and everyone can get everything, the long tail story will naturally happen. Before that, the big hit or big Mass production rules everything. Today, although we are still fascinated by the big hits, they are no longer the only market. The big hits are now competing with countless large and small market segments, and consumers are increasingly favoring diversity The curve of customer consumption data sorted by popularity shows that at the head of the curve, several popular songs have been downloaded countless times, and then the curve drops abruptly as the popularity of the track decreases.

But the interesting thing is that it has not dropped to zero. In statistics, a curve of this shape is called a "long tail distribution" because its tail is particularly long compared to the head. This is the origin of the "Long Tail Theory". The head means a single mass production, and the long tail means a differentiated and diverse small batch production. Both coexist in today's market, but the latter represents the future. "

"When I was a teenager, I was at the peak of the era of popular culture-in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, ordinary young people had only five or six TV channels to watch, and there were very few programs to choose from. Everyone watches the same programs. There are only three or four rock radio stations in each city, and most of those programs are broadcast exclusively to musicians; only a few rich lucky boys can collect some records-this is It was a fashionable thing at the time. We could only go to the cinema to watch the same summer blockbusters and get news from the same newspapers and broadcasts. If you want to go out of the mainstream world, the only places to go are libraries and comic bookstores. Think about it carefully. I think that there are only two types of non-popular culture that I have come into contact with. One is books, and the other is the stuff that my friends and I fabricated, but these are nothing more than self-entertainment in my backyard.

Now, let’s compare my adolescence and Ben. This is a 16-year-old kid who grew up in the Internet age. He is an only child and his parents are rich people in the noble North Berkeley Hills, so he has an Apple Mac computer, an up-to-date iPod player (plus iTunes’ weekly limited download), and a group of equally wealthy friends. Like other people of his age, Ben never knew that this world used to have no broadband, no mobile phones, no MP3s, no TiVo, and no online shopping. The main impact of this smooth flow of information is that people can access a variety of cultures and content without restriction and filtering, from mainstream culture to the most marginal corners of the underground world.

Ben's growth environment is completely different from mine. Any traditional media and entertainment industry has far less control over the world than in my time. If you find it difficult to be seated while reading this book, just imagine from the perspective of this book. The reality of his life is a portrayal of our future world. From the perspective of this, there is no distinction between high and low culture. Commercial and non-commercial content and amateur creation are all competing for his attention. He can’t tell the difference between mainstream hotspots and underground areas—he only chooses what he likes from an infinitely long menu. In this menu, Hollywood movies and funny videos made by computer players are juxtaposed. , Regardless of high or low. "

In fact , the life we lead has become the way of life of most people . Compared to our fathers, the Z-generation (1 995 Nian ~ 2010 years) children born have more options. In the early stages of our perception of the world, we have many choices. This has diverted consumer groups that were originally concentrated in a few mainstream hot options .

" Broadcasting has an amazing thing: it can deliver a program to millions of people with unmatched efficiency. But it can't do the opposite—deliver millions of programs to the same person. And this is the strength of the Internet. The economics of the broadcasting era needs golden programs (big hits) to attract a large number of viewers. The economics of the broadband era has been completely reversed. For a communication network that is best at doing peer-to-peer communications, it is in the same It is too costly and wasteful to pass the same piece of information to millions of people.

Cultural hits are still needed, but they are no longer the only market. Big hits are now competing with countless large and small market segments, and consumers are increasingly favoring the market with the largest choice. The era of the same thing or one product sold all over the world is coming to an end, and its status is being replaced by a new thing-a diversified market. "

Advances in technology will profoundly affect human life style. So as long as our world continues to undergo technological updates , our lives will continue to undergo rapid changes .

" Niche products have always existed, but as the cost of contacting them has dropped rapidly (consumers find them easier, and they find consumers easier), they suddenly become a cultural and economic force that cannot be underestimated. These new niche markets have not replaced the traditional hot markets, but have jumped onto the same stage as the hottests for the first time. For a century, we have been accustomed to discovering hotspots and discarding everything else in order to maximize Use costly shelves, screens, channels, and attention efficiently.

Now, in this new age of networking and digitization, this marketing economics has been completely changed, because the Internet absorbed it come into contact with each line industry, you can also have shopping malls, cinema and radio functions, and costs It's just a fraction of the past. We can imagine the reduction of marketing costs as a declining water surface or a receding ocean tide. As they receded, a new piece of land appeared-it was always there, but hidden underwater. These niche products are great treasures that cannot be found on the map. They contain many products that were not considered economically effective in the past and failed to make it to the table. But many products have always been here, but they are not easy to be seen or discovered.

They are movies that have not been shown in cinemas, music that has not been broadcast on rock radio stations, and sports equipment that Wal-Mart has not sold. Now you can get them, either through Netflix, or through Amazon, or just search on Google. The invisible market is now visible. "

" There are other brand-new niche products created by a new industry that is just emerging. This industry is at the junction of the commercial and non-commercial worlds. Here, it is difficult to say when professionals will give up and become amateurs. This is the world of bloggers, video clan and "garage bands" who suddenly found their audience, thanks to the enviable economic magic of digital distribution. "

One of the things I want to do , is to create some kind of tool that can make a person had received only nine years of compulsory education , it is possible to spend one hour to master the use of such tools, and produce some products uploaded to the network , for others to consume. For example , a user can take advantage of this tool is very simple to make some small works , these works of course with professional studio big production are worlds apart, but the victory at low cost. As long as everyone is willing to spend some time, they can transform their ideas into displayable products . Then in the content produced by these massive users , some fine products will surely emerge in the end .

" With unlimited supply, our view on the relative roles of hot and niche products is completely wrong. Hot is products with scarce supply — if there are only a few shelves and a few bands, the only wise way is to This space is reserved for the most popular items. But what if we have an infinite number of shelves? In this case, it may be the wrong way to do business only to stare at the hottest items. After all, non-hot items are far more important than hot items Many, and both are now equally easily available. From the real niche products to the full-fledged “failure products” (super unpopular products), if all these non-hots are aggregated into a market as big as the hot market (not to mention What will happen to the larger) market? The answer is obvious: it will completely change some of the largest markets in the world. "

When the environment changes, the rules of the game also change. If we can't change our approach as the rules of the game change. Then we will make mistakes. Any way of doing things , only can play a role in certain circumstances, if we are trying in all environments use the same approach that we may make mistakes.

" Frankly speaking, this truth is indeed very, very weird. Basically any thing you offer is bought by someone, which sounds a bit weird. It is weird because we generally don’t think about the performance of a product. You can’t sell a single product every quarter.