This should be required reading for anyone who wants to do business online. It's that important.

This is a fascinating ethnography of the blooming digital economy: with costs of inventory and distribution of goods heading to zero, a new dynamic of economics of abundance is emerging.

Anderson thoroughly explores multiple dimensions of the core model/graph, that of a power law curve. He provides easy-to-comprehend examples of many modern tech giants (still relevant in 2020, 14 years later) that emulate aspects of these new rules dictating supply and demand.

Lastly, Anderson offers quite pointed suggestions on companies participating in the Long Tail, on a strategic level.

A great book for every online reseller to read.

Ideas now seem a bit outdated in 2022 world IMO (economies of scale from successful creatives or the 1st/2nd place winners of categories will allow them to continue to dominate + attention fatigue continues to allow the winners to be the easier pick or option for consumers, ie paradox of choice is still very powerful)

Refreshing (in today’s age) and interesting to hear the optimism of the advent of the web2.0 era though

Chris Anderson's book can be summarized by saying that the consumer retail market these days is driven more by a bottom-up movement (what he calls "post-filters") than by top-down factors ("pre-filters"). The idea can also be synthesized by saying that "hits" are no longer as big as they once were because they now compete with individuals with louder voices.

For example, during its most popular seasons, "I Love Lucy" was watched by 70 percent of households with televisions. That kind of homogenized market in TV viewership is unheard of today. You can't draw that kind of percentage even with a presidential address. The reason is obvious: we have so many more choices. Anderson analyzes this in many markets (music, television, clothing, even the button industry) and all yield the same paradigm shift: we're moving towards a culture of niches, one that ultimately complements (not replaces) the "hits" we're used to.

This is a fantastic modern read. Anderson not only describes with detail and humor the consumerist society in which we participate, but does it with a very relaxed, colloquial tone that allows a quick, enjoyable read.

This is an amazing book by the 2005 Times top 100 and Editor of Wired magazine is 10 years old, however, it was a prophetic account of how the new business models of the information age are changing human society.
1- In the old model we were limited by geography in everything from local interests to products we consume, massive supply chains of the 20th century replaced that with mass production and national/global interests and products
2- supply chain models suffered a physical constraints of scarce shelf space, inventories, broadcast time, etc which meant a pre-filtering process had to be established to decide which products should occupy those limited spaces, hence, a strong consumption bias emerged for top products and top songs creating the 80-20 rule, i.e., 20% of hits dominated 80% of demand
3- Modern information age business models broke away from the constraints of physical atoms to the abundance of digital bits, e.g., amazon, iTunes changed this formula by making it very cheap to offer millions of products to consumers who in turn started moving away from the top hits down the curve to the long tail of niche offerings. the 80-20 rule of traditional manufactured goods has been replaced by a long tail of low volume products catering to every consumer needs
4- The web, YouTube and eBay went even further to democratize supply creating a market place where millions of suppliers meet millions of consumers over billions of offerings.
5- such long tail of products required a new mechanism of guidance and filtering (post-filtering) to enable sifting and finding what they need in the jungle of products along the long tail.

The audiobook has a treat interview with Chris Anderson at the end where he talks about his extraordinary career and future thoughts

Highly recommended to all business readers

This book takes an interesting idea and stretches it out way too long, no pun intended. This could have easily been a magazine article.

If you ever wanted to know the definition of the "long tail" idea then this is the book. Long tail is an idea that has been popularized and bandied about in lots of different venues. The book gets very broad and applies the long tail idea in uneven ways. So don't expect something with the theoretic bent of "A Brief History of Time."

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson offers a visionary look at the future of business and common culture. The long-tail phenomenon, he argues, will "re-shape our understanding of what people actually want to watch" (or read, etc.). While Anderson presents a fascinating idea backed by thoughtful (if repetitive) analysis, many critics questioned just how greatly the niche market will rework our common popular culture. Anderson convinced most reviewers in his discussion of Internet media sales, but his KitchenAid and Lego examples fell flat. A few pointed out that online markets constitute just 10 percent of U.S. retail, and brick-and-mortar stores will never disappear. Anderson's thesis came under a separate attack by Lee Gomes in his Wall Street Journal column. Anderson had defined the "98 Percent Rule" in his book to mean that no matter how much inventory is made available online, 98 percent of the items will sell at least once. Yet Gomes cited statistics that could indicate that, as the Web and Web services become more mainstream, the 98 Percent Rule may no longer apply: "Ecast [a music-streaming company] told me that now, with a much bigger inventory than when Mr. Anderson spoke to them two years ago, the quarterly no-play rate has risen from 2% to 12%. March data for the 1.1 million songs of Rhapsody, another streamer, shows a 22% no-play rate; another 19% got just one or two plays." If Anderson overreaches in his thesis, he has nonetheless written "one of those business books that, ironically, deserves more than a niche readership" (Houston Chronicle).

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

I give up...I can't take any more of this horribly boring book. My economics textbook keeps my interest better than this, which is extremely sad. I'm giving it two stars instead of one only because it had a few good tidbits of information regarding the evolution of the music and publishing industries (there was some interesting stuff about things such as Myspace and Lulu that I hadn't heard before). None the less, this is another book about an idea that probably made a fascinating article in a magazine or a slightly interesting online blog, but expanding it into a book took it beyond its attention captivating capabilities. You could easily fit what the book addresses into a multi-page article without loosing any of the integrity of the theory (and without boring the reader to tears).

Though I read the book only recently, and lot of stuff is dated, most of his ideas hold pretty solid - in a way, that is the long tail of his ideas - they continue to be as relevant as before.

Интересна концепция и невероятно явление (макар и да става ясно, че не го е открил автора, а Безос).

Интригуващото икономо-психологично поведение на масата и бързо развиващите се пазари, карат света на парите и поведението на хората свързано с тях да се променят ежегодно.

Концепцията е добра. Kнигата прави препратки към 80/20, основни demand/supply, както и креативност и поведение на масите.

Всичко това може да се прочете в страницата на wiki за long tail.