This was basically required reading as an SEO but oh my god it was so boring. The same examples were harped on over and over and over again and the points were explained and re-explained and re-re-explained to death. The author took digital trends and tried to place them over physical economies and failed to explain how that would work.

This book could have easily been a third as long. It raised some interesting points, yes, but they were lost in the sludge.

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

TL;DR: Meh. Read the review instead of the book.

Another one of those superficial magazine articles forced into books. 2.5/5 rounded down to 2 instead of rounding up because it fails in its grandiose claims though this would typically be a solid 3. No it doesn’t articulate anything not understood within the framework of conventional economics. It’s techno-optimistic in that uniquely Valley way - the author notably dismisses the concept of news bubbles in a sentence. Retrospectively, not one of his finer moments. Lastly, for a supposedly futuristic book it is rather tame and doesn’t really try any new prediction (for which at least one could declare it bold) and only extrapolates further on the most obvious trends - anywhere there has been a modification to the model the book has little descriptive power (subscription economies).

Cảm thấy khá hài lòng, xuyên suốt cuốn sách, tác giả đã đưa ra rất nhiều ví dụ thực tế để làm mình thấy rõ hơn 2 điều
- Tại sao các ông lớn như Google, Facebook, Amazon... lại đưa ra những cách thức kinh doanh như vậy.
- Cách mà những ông lớn này tận dụng người dùng làm việc miễn phí cho họ như thế nào.

Kiến thức trong cuốn sách này rất giá trị cho những ai chưa có ý tưởng kinh doanh hoặc đơn giản là muốn tìm hiểu những mô hình kinh doanh đã và đang thành công.
1 điểm trừ là tác giả viết hơi dài nên đọc hơi mệt.

Rereading, 20 years after it was published puts in focus what was right, what was missed, what was flavor of the decade (2000) and what was foreshadowed.

Right : Niches. From fandom to craft beers. Quintessential long tail.

Missed : the polarization of individual beliefs, etc. The echo chambers were dismissed as an almost impossibility.

Foreshadowed: the recuperation of peers, crowdsourcing by the businesses aka influencers.

Overall I think it was a defining text of its time before the monopolies of social medias, Google and Amazon took over and used it for themselves.

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.

Read the first 10 pages and thought to myself "Why the fuck am I reading this?". Skimmed through the rest and confirmed that it probably wouldn't be worth my time.

The main problem is that the idea of the book comes off as dated now (~15 years after it was originally published). Everyone, well, I do, at least, knows that the internet is allowing people to discover more things and indulge in niche passions. In 2006, this was probably not as obvious.

It seemed to me that this book had the problem that most business books have: summarisable in 1 page or less. This is not a good characteristic for a book to have. I actually think that ~50% of the content can be compressed to 1 line: the internet is allowing consumers to be more specific with their desires, there is a market for these niches as a result of this.

1 star is probably a little harsh. I think if I would have read all the way through it probably would have received 2. It's probably an ok book. But I'm not in the business of reading ok books.

This book was a bit of a weird read because it was written far enough ago now that a bunch of its references and case studies are out of date. For example, it was talking about Blockbuster and Napster, which are hardly relevant in 2020.

But still, the ideas in this book are super important and have influenced a whole generation of businessmen and marketers, and so even though bits of it felt out of date, it was still very much worth reading. True, if you’re already familiar with the overall concept of the long tail then there’s nothing much here to learn about, but if you’re not then I’d suggest giving this a read to make sure that you are.

I mean, with that said, there’s also a whole heap of research and case studies here for you to learn from, although again, you should remember that some of them are out of date. Honestly, this is such a seminal book that the chances are that there’s an updated edition knocking around, so maybe have a look to check that out before buying a used copy, like I did.

But overall, I would of course recommend it if you’re the entrepreneurial type. If not, there’s not much point, although it could give you a greater insight into the way things actually work.

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

May revisit with a longer review, but the short tail of it is the relentless cheerleading for big tech and the “visionary” exploiteneurs Bezos and a whole host of others—many of which had already crashed and burned by the time I picked up the book a few years after publication. The tail turned out to be overly long or just too skinny for the likes of Ecast, Excite, or hell, even Lehman Bros.?

Almost entirely about lo-fi music streaming and movies and other shit that has to be marketed heavily to create / manufacture want—i.e. useless stuff.

The author asserts in the intro that he “coined the term ‘The Long Tail’”, which is total bullshit. The phrase—to describe the downside risk of the same “phenomena” at the uber-commercial heart of this book—has been used in finance, and insurance specifically, since at least the early 1900s.

Nếu ai từng tiếp xúc với e-commerce thì chắc hẳn đều đã nghe qua thuật ngữ ”long tail, short tail” và sẽ bị thu hút bởi tiêu đề quyển sách này. Đáng tiếc thay, đây là cuốn sách minh chứng cho việc các đầu sách về kinh tế – khoa h���c – công nghệ ở VN đi sau thời đại trễ như thế nào.

Cuốn sách gốc được Chris Anderson viết vào năm 2006 và mãi tận 13 năm sau (2019), VN mới có bản dịch đầu tiên đến tay độc giả. Mình mới đọc xong quyển này vào năm 2021 và thấy có chút thất vọng vì những kiến thức trong sách bây giờ đã quá phổ biến và dễ nhận thấy ở bất kì đâu.

Hãy nhìn vào tất cả các app mua sắm – tiêu thụ nội dung trên điện thoại của bạn. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Shopee, etc với kho lưu trữ sản phẩm không giới hạn đã mở ra sự vô hạn về sự lựa chọn cho khách hàng. Nó tạo ra vô số các thị trường ngách (niche) nhỏ mà gộp lại mang lại doanh thu lớn ko kém so với các sản phẩm HIT. Quy luật Pareto 80/20, kinh tế học khan hiếm hầu như bị phá vỡ.

Hãy tưởng tượng bạn đọc được những kiến thức đi trước thời đại cả 15 năm này vào 1 thời điểm sớm hơn. Còn bây giờ thì hầu như mình chỉ đọc lướt sách để nắm ý vì các giải thích, ví dụ của sách đã quá outdated trong năm 2021. Tuy nhiên, nó vẫn có thể sẽ hữu ích với những ai không tiếp xúc với công nghệ nhiều để hiểu hơn các xu hướng mua sắm đã quá đỗi phổ cập trong năm 2021 này.

Excellent read on how the marketplace is changing and how niche products and services that used to be inaccessible to the masses are now so much more accessible as variable costs of bringing services and products to market have declined substantially.