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.

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

Superb. Incredibly well-written and researched. Anderson is one of my favorite authors. This is one of the most important business books written in years. Read it...then read it again.

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

I now finally understand why this book is the classic it is. Took me long enough to find out, but I did get around to it. I had to dodge around a rather long tail to get at it. A har har.

It is phenomenally prescient as well, and unpacks the case beautifully and elegantly.

The book is split, however. The first hundred pages are a phenomenal introduction of the general idea. and sells the thesis hook, line, and sinker. The remainder meanders a bit with overbogged details, but they don't rob the book of the power of the first third. Read just that, if you haven't the time, but you want to see what it's about, so you can quote it in business meetings to show off how much you think you know. That can be my Blinkist-ish recommendation.

I disliked this book for two reasons: I do not believe it represents any original ideas and it is, like most business books, horribly verbose. Yawn-zilla. Yawn-a-saurus rex. Avoid.

I take issue with the idea that this book even represents a body of original ideas. The long tail concept is very cute, but after reading it, I can't stop thinking about the story of Sears-Roebuck which Anderson writes about. The notion of giving people access to a plethora of products that were heretofore unobtainable has been done before, we're told. The conclusion I drew was that Amazon and other businesses like it simply do the same thing for the world today that Sears-Roebuck did back then, so that there's still nothing new under the sun. Anderson works backward, arguing that Sears-Roebuck represented an earlier, similar long tail phenomenon. The economics of "abundance" still seems to me to fall into the realm of orthodox economics of a kind Adam Smith would have well-understood: In competitive markets, price approaches marginal cost. Since bits are so cheap that we can take their cost to be negligible, we can provide more and more varied kinds of bits. Instead, Anderson seems to start by assuming this is something totally new and has to develop an elaborate mythology around it so that he'll have something to write about for 300 pages. Like the Black Swan, this book could have been 50 pages and offered as an ebook, satisfying Anderson's own long-tail definition by not fitting the typical pattern of other boring business books.

I’ve been reading what I like to think of as some “business-lite” books for school, pulling me (kicking & screaming) away from my beloved novels, fictional worlds, and imaginary characters. Apparently there is little or no place for novels in business. The good news is that these business-lite books are, by their very nature, super-readable and somewhat interesting. They are also (again, I guess by their very nature) the most repetitive books imaginable. While I like novels, and have even read some relatively challenging ones in my time, I’m not some brainiac devotee of Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest (never read any of ‘em), so I don’t think I’m holding any of these books to some unattainable standard. Plain and simple: these books repeat themselves like children’s literature. Like a nursery rhyme. Reading Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail was like reading Goodnight Moon with the words “long” and “tail” replacing the words “goodnight” and “moon.”

Some theories on this:
a) The Captains (not to mention the Lieutenants & Corporals & Privates) of Industry who read these books want to have the main points drilled and re-drilled through their brains for anything to stick well enough to be integrated into their “elevator speeches.”
b) These business-lite books all begin as tiny magazine essays, little newspaper columns, or short speeches that are then fleshed out into books, but never really have enough meat on their bones to fill out an entire book-skeleton. (Gross?)
c) The writers are bad.
d) The readers are stupid.
e) All of the above?

Actually, I think it’s sort of e), except that the writers aren’t really that bad and the readers probably aren’t that stupid (maybe a little on both scores but just a little). Mostly I think there’s simply not enough substance in any of these books to fill an entire BOOK. Essay, definitely. Pamphlet, sure. Book, nope.

This is not to say that these books are not interesting. Far from it. The Long Tail was actually very interesting and helpful in putting a lot of ideas into a cohesive and compelling theory. The central thesis is that in a world of easy digital distribution, choices are so abundant that the so-called "niches" are a source of incredible growth. (I can write this from memory, so maybe having the thesis drilled into my brain over and over was, in fact, useful.) With Amazon and iTunes and Netflix (Anderson LOVES those guys!), scarcity of shelf space is no longer an issue, so the online stores can stock everything, and be able to sell a wider array of products to fewer people and still make money. Anyway, I was fascinated by the combination of not just the economic and technological, but also the cultural, analysis. Or at least the economic and technological analyses opened lots of doors to further cultural analyses.

Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded worked sort of the same way – it felt particularly cobbled together from bits and pieces of pre-existing columns, but still had some thought-provoking moments. Those thought-provoking moments, however, were buried beneath a mountain of simplistic analysis and insanely repetitive writing. After the first 100 pages you can read one out of every four paragraphs and more than follow the arguments. If you think Anderson’s writing is repetitive, Friedman’s has the quadruple whammy of being doubly repetitive AND doubly simplistic. The Long Tail : Goodnight Moon :: Hot, Flat, and Crowded : Where's Spot?

And if Hot, Flat, and Crowded is like Where's Spot?, then Larry Weber’s Marketing to the Social Web is like a finger-painting on the fridge. It almost has those huge cardboard pages that tiny, chubby fingers can turn. As with the others, the ideas it contains are not bad, it’s just a book that should have been a 10-page paper. It probably WAS at some point. Why it needed to be torturously extended over 272 pages no one will ever know. Oh wait, I might’ve just figured it out: maybe it has something to do with selling a 272-page hardback book on Amazon for $16.47 and making a whole lot more moolah from it than a 10-page paper that you can maybe post on your blog or hand out to your friends at dinner parties or something.

So I get it, Larry Weber; I understand, Thomas Friedman; I see you, Chris Anderson. But it's almost enough to make a reader feel crazy. Every page is like, “didn’t I just read this?” and then sometimes you’re like “I AM READING A SENTENCE COPIED VERBATIM FROM THREE PARAGRAPHS AGO!!!”

In conclusion, The Long Tail is by far the least annoying of the three, and it is absolutely worth reading. Hot, Flat, and Crowded – if you ever read Friedman’s columns in the Times, skip it; if you don’t ever read those columns, then maybe skim the book. Marketing to the Social Web...I think you could probably get the salient stuff from just about any blog. Including this one, if you care to ask me.

"Marketing, Spot, marketing!"

The book is an extended version of the author's wired article (2004): https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/

I decided to read the book because i really liked that article. It had a lot of valid points 18 years later. The book sorta disappointed me though. The book is wordy, a lot of repetition, etc. At times, I just skimmed thru paragraphs and ended up skipping them. The article's value density was significantly higher than the book. Still not a bad book, if you have not read the article.

Livro excelente sobre o mercado de nichos. Anderson explica como a soma da demanda dos milhares de menores nichos pode ser mais interessante que o mercado de massa.

Essencial para quem trabalha com marketplace ou oferece soluções para diferentes perfis de clientes.

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.

I was recommended this book by many peers to understand the possibilities of the internet. I was fascinated that this book was written almost 15 years back when the internet was gaining popularity. Many concepts in the book are very relevant even today. The book shares how the internet has provided unlimited options to consumers which eventually led to disruptions in many industries like retail, Music, Movies etc. The concept of consumers finding their own niche interests via the internet which led to selling of more of less popular products. It is a good book to understand consumer preferences in the digital era and how small businesses can take advantage of the long tail by concentrating on a particular niche

Here's another book that was based on a Wired magazine article (see NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity).

A pretty good write-up of the long tail phenomenon in business.

The gist of it is, as the cost of maintaining an inventory of some commodity declines, the profitability of niche markets increases. And especially when your commodity is bits and bytes, the cost has declined dramatically, creating all kinds of business opportunities.

Worth reading, but it's a bit dated. Mentions MySpace and Sun. There's a bare mention of 3D printing.