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Doubts Multiply About the "Long Tail"
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 23, 2008 02:31 PM
from the to-him-who-hath-shall-be-given dept.
from the to-him-who-hath-shall-be-given dept.
fruey sends in a New Scientist analysis of the many second thoughts about the Long Tail theory. It summarizes four studies that show, in different markets, that the tail is both flatter and thinner than originally supposed, and that blockbusters are not going away in those markets — they are getting bigger. It's theorized that widely used collaborative filtering software is magnifying the winners' share of the various pies, and peer influence is a large contributor to consumer behavior.
Related Stories
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News: The Long Tail 290 comments
Chris Anderson writes "I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."
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Harvard Study Questions "Long Tail" Theory 177 comments
mjasay writes "Remember 'the long tail?' That was the idea that there was gobs of money to be made in the more obscure tastes of any given market, enabled by the web. In recent research highlighted in the Harvard Business Review, however, the long tail theory comes under withering criticism. Not only is a hits-based business more profitable for vendors according to the new research, but the research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits, rather than the tail. In short, the researchers find that 'the tail is long and flat, and therefore that content providers will find it hard to profit much from it.'" Long Tail advocate Chris Anderson defends his theory, and it seems that most of the debate centers around how you define "head" and "tail."
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I, for one, am not part of the long tail.. (Score:2, Interesting)
So I'm not even part of the fat root
Re:I, for one, am not part of the long tail.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped buying CDs when the music companies started sueing their own customers.
You too? I thought I was the only one. I rarely bought music in the past, then downloaded a few songs which I would never have paid for but just wanted to hear. Then the RIAA started with their crap and I stopped listening to it all. There's nothing like being blamed for their crappy product. I mean, have the major labels actually put out that much good music in the last 10 years to even download? It seems like the bar has gotten awfully low.
As far as the "long tail" theory, I'm surprised that it was accepted that much at the time. Anderson sounded like the he had the same kind of glazed eye look about the future of the internet as the Web 2.0/Social networking people do when you talk to them.
Do people fundamentally change when they have more than one option to choose? I would have guessed rarely. Just because people have more choices does not mean they make statistically random choices. People have far greater psychological issues about what they choose and why they choose them than just availability. People like to be on the bandwagon and choose what their friends do, they like to choose things they've heard of and feel safe about, what's been recently marketed to them, comfort foods vs. healthy foods, etc.
Although we are all unique individuals following the herd, we by-and-large make the same choices about things, with a little bit of variance thrown in to keep it interesting. Raise your hand if you've never eaten at a McDonalds or drank a Coke before.
The internet may offer a wide variety of things in theory, but in reality it is businesses trying to offer customers the products that will give them the best ROI, and that means you'll make more money off the herd than a few outsiders demanding obscure products and services.
It makes sense to push items that the herd wants to buy. It makes sense to push the same things the other players are pushing and focus on better volume marketing, rather than pushing obscure things that a relatively few want and spending more money on targetted advertising.
The consumer follows the same approach as others, otherwise Walmart would not have been able to be in the position it's in.
Parent
Re:I, for one, am not part of the long tail.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, have the major labels actually put out that much good music in the last 10 years to even download? It seems like the bar has gotten awfully low.
Possibly. Or maybe you've just aged and your tastes have changed as they've become more refined (a nice way of saying you've become pickier). That sort of makes sense since you, being older now, are not the RIAA's primary target market (which tends to be in the teens, younger 20s, etc). Additionally, being older, you're also not as impressionable. A song that would have affected you at age 15 (when emotions were high, and many experiences were imprinting themselves on your mind) would barely make a dent now or may not even be noticeable.
There has been good stuff produced in the past 10 years. I know names like Britney Spears pops to mind when you think about the crap out there, but there are a lot of artists who are part of the big labels who don't get the same face or radio time for whatever reason.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad the article only focuses on legal downloads and such. I'm pretty sure that the long tail effect does exists, just not in the paid download market.
Re:I, for one, am not part of the long tail.. (Score:5, Funny)
Quite obviously, it must exist. The lack of evidence simply means it is an invisible tail, well hidden from the eyes of the unsuspecting public. Probably some sort of conspiracy of the short-tailed...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I must say, it's quite an accomplishment that for a product that would normally have steady demand to have the whole recording industry crying foul at the same time, and doing horribly. It's like the RIAA doesn't want to actually make money or something.
Sounds like he got the long tail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like he got the long tail (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, we all know about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button because of all the advertisement money spent on it and the use the Oprah Winfrey's show as an additional ad vehicle along with "E" and other such crap that fills the airwaves.
If "The Long Tail" is accurate, then there could be a much smaller independant movie that will could be released at the same time as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and that will make as much money as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but in a longer time frame. This is because you and I think this independant movie stinks when we hear about it, but your neighbor and mine thinks it's the Bee's Knees and search out art-house showings and buy the DVD and watch it whenever it shows on the Idependant Film Channel and Sundance and spread the word so that the thing takes on it's own life in a manner similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Of course, if "The Long Tail" is wrong, then this independant film will more likely resemble "Howard The Duck".
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I see your point. As far as the movie example, $10 per ticket will give "top tier" movies like Benjamin Button such a jump in gross sales that art house flicks and other creepers in the long tail section will never make up the ground. Net sales, OTOH, may be a different story.
Not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly.
It is the hypothesis that ALL of the non-Harry Potter books COLLECTIVELY will sell as much or more than the Harry Potter books themselves.
Even that is wrong. It isn't a single book or a single series. It's the percentages. It is the hypothesis that the 80% of lesser selling titles will equal or exceed the sales of the top 20%. Or 90% / 10%. Or wherever you want to make the cut.
In theory, it is easy to demonstrate. Suppose there are 2 blockbusters released in a category ... and the average person buy 10 items in that category. So, 20% of the sales would go to the blockbusters ... but 80% would go to the "long tail".
The problem is that the average person does NOT operate that way. They might by the latest Harry Potter book ... and no other book that year. The same with music. The same with movies.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that's what The Long Tail says at all. It doesn't say that an obscure indie movie or book should make as much as a blockbuster. It just says that the indie movie ought to be able to make money now, when it would have lost money under older distribution systems.
The indie movie shouldn't need to gather a huge cult following. It just needs to find the audience that would enjoy watching it. That wouldn't have happened under the old 'roll out in thirty theaters nationwide model'. According to
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which coincidentally enough, just made it onto Hulu this week! I intend to watch it again, as I was strange enough to have loved this as a child. It was my favorite movie, in fact.
Re:Where do free items fit in? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, at least, I used to. A few years ago I got sick and tired of being FORCED to watch advertisements for movies I will NEVER watch, and FBI warnings that mean nothing to me. So, I stopped buying DVDs.
Now I just watch them at the theatre if I think they will be good or just wait for them to appear on U-Verse.
***offtopic***Will someone tell those ass-wipes in Hollyweird that they are losing valuable customers with this practice of putting in useless ads and trying to force people to watch them. I have DVDs that are getting long in the tooth and it's kind of sickening to see ads for movies that have come and gone. Why can't things be like my DVD of The Matrix? When I put The Matrix into my DVD Player, the thing starts at the movie! What a unique concept! DUMBASSES!
Don't even get me started on Blu-Ray. I'm supposed to buy my movie collection again just to get innundated with the same crap?***offtopic***
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember when DVDs first came out? You could watch previews, if you actively looked for them on the disc. They were often sequestered in the special features menu. Which is ideal because trailers for future movies have a shelf life of a month or two. Whereas the movie you purchased is meant to last for years. That was the whole point of buying it
Definition (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, this was my first encounter with "the long tail", so all I know about it is what I read in the article. It seems this particular article is defining "the long tail" as an ability for retailers to sell a lot more different items, so some of the peak demand for the most popular items (blockbusters) gets spread out to the extra selection that wouldn't normally be available in a B&M store. Also, it briefly mentions a small possibility of an unexpected blockbuster arising from that extra selection.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The phrase "long tail" has a couple of related, but different meanings - both from the shape of a graph of sales (or popularity) on the Y-axis.
In this case, the X-axis is a listing of different titles, sorted by popularity. There are a small number of extremely popular items, tailing off to huge numbers of less popular items.
In the other use, the X-axis is time. Something can be hugely popular for a few days/weeks/months, but will continue to have greatly diminished sales for many years to come.
The concept
Re:Definition (Score:5, Informative)
What is the long tail? The summary, and TFA (I skimmed it so maybe I missed this) seem to indicate that the long tail theory means the more obscure stuff will be more popular.
The long tail theory is:
1) More obscure stuff will be more profitable (because distribution costs are down - you can distribute electronic goods for practically nothing, and even real goods are more profitable because you can keep them in a warehouse in Wisconsin instead of taking up premium shelf space at a retail store downtown NYC)
2) Because its profitable, people will actually carry it.
3) Because people will carry it, people that actually want it will be able to find it and buy it.
4) Because people can find and buy the obscure stuff they want they'll spend less on the popular stuff they don't want as much. So the blockbusters will lose some of their sales to the obscure stuff.
In reality, this doesn't seem to be happening.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
4) Because people can find and buy the obscure stuff they want they'll spend less on the popular stuff they don't want as much. So the blockbusters will lose some of their sales to the obscure stuff.
It seems to me that blockbusters are getting bigger, AND the tail is getting longer. More money is being spent at both ends of the curve. This would imply that the curves in the New Scientist article graphic are incorrect: the long tail isn't stealing dollars from the blockbusters. It's not a zero-sum game.
Of course, throw in a tanking economy and all bets are off...
Re:Definition (Score:5, Informative)
The idea here is that stocking, e.g., a few copies of a LOT of relatively unpopular books, allows you to cater to niche markets and can significantly increase profits compared to only carrying products that are in high demand.
Companies like Amazon are masters at exploiting the long tail. Oh, and here [wired.com] is the original article describing this idea.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
it's used for both (Score:2)
Many long-tail proponents argue that the two meanings you discuss are related: when distribution/stocking costs for obscure works go to zero, it can be profitable to stock/sell them, and therefore they will actually be stocked/sold by online retailers. Since this makes the works much more readily available than previously, their sales will (collectively) go up.
The hypothesis is that the reason the top N works account for such a large market share traditionally is at least in part the practical problems with
Re:Definition (Score:4, Informative)
The article notes that despite the long tail, we still have blockbusters. This isn't really in conflict with the theory of the long tail. Indeed the theory mostly talks about the (previously untapped) potential of the long tail... but blockbusters will always exist. TFA says that despite niche markets, most of the sales, and most of the money, still comes from the best-sellers or the blockbusters.
I think (part of) the explanation for this is from free content. I think that anyone trying to capitalize on the long tail will have a hard time competing with amateurs, enthusiasts, and free information. For mainstream content (e.g. a generic action movie), amateurs won't be able to compete with the budget and brand recognition of established studios. But for niche interests, amateurs will often be producing the "best content" and giving it away for free, making it impossible for commercial interests to capitalize on it. Think about the variety of niche blogs, forums, wikibooks, YouTube channels, creative commons music or books, and so forth.
So I would say that the long tail exists, and is healthy... but is harder to monetize than some people may have thought. The fact is that niche interests exist, but those niche communities are often finding that they can satisfy their needs themselves, leaving no room for commercial entities to capitalize.
Parent
It had to happen sooner or later (Score:4, Insightful)
A summary that told me so much, yet so little.
"Long Tail theory" No idea. Apparently I missed an article somewhere.
"flatter and thinner" I gotto admit, tails in an evolutionary sense popped to mind here for some reason. Though the mention of markets made that an obvious red herring.
"blockbusters are not going away" Aha, movies!
"widely used collaborative filtering software is magnifying the winners' share of the various pies" Say what?
Re:It had to happen sooner or later (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
They can't HANDLE the long tail! (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course they want to sell you new media. Old media has the unfortunate quality of being old. Should copyright extension insanity ever end, old content is closer to becoming free content.
If they can induce you to fill your time with new, "premium" content by splashing adverts at you and skewing selection algorithms on Amazon and the like, they will prefer to every time. New stuff commands a higher price. New stuff has higher margins. New stuff keeps the media industry running, and they have clout.
Old stuff is, like, yesterdays stuff. Even if it's better.
Tinfoil hat time (Score:2)
I for one have often browsed the shelves of airport bookstores and have walked out disgusted every time because I can't find anything worth reading. I've even passed up classics because they only stock the most poorly done translatio
Consumers change slowly.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty silly to expect that everyone is going to change their behavior immediately due to increased availability of a larger variety of goods. When cable came along and people were given a larger amount of choice of television programming viewing habits didn't change overnight, they changed over decades.
People are creatures of habit. It'd be more interesting to see if the variety of goods people buy varies with age. If so, expect that "long tail" to eventually appear as the population turns over.
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting, comparing it to cable TV. What a lot of people do not know is that most of the niche cable channels (think Golf Channel) aren't very profitable. They still exist because they managed to get themselves listed with the cable company and this guarantees them revenue, regardless of actual viewing habits. The ad space is really cheap as well, and this attracts certain types of marketers.
What happens if we get total ala carte channel selection where everyone gets to decide if they can receive the
Missed the point (Score:4, Interesting)
The habit (of wanting what everybody else wants) is not waning as selection and availability increase. The habit is reinforced by the increasing channels by which we can see what everybody else wants and adjust our own wants to that.
The Internet, while logistically making the long tail feasible, is socially making blockbusters bigger.
Parent
"selling less of more" (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, it is clear that the way to make a lot of money as a retailer is to have the popular options at a low price, a la Wal Mart. As the article suggests, though, have a few niche items can make money, if you can get people to pay for therm.
Here is what I think. Stocking an item, even a virtual item, incurs a cost. So if one stocks a million different items, and only one thousand different items moves a week, then there are costs not being covered on an even yearly basis. One way to make this work it mark up items a lot, as in the used book store, wher a book can be bought for a dime and sold for a dollar.
To me the long tail means either selling in a high markup niche market, or having the ability to control costs so you can sell less of more different things and actually draw a profit. In either case, the long tail in going to be chanllenged in times that force are going to force some fiscal responsibility, and people are going to focus on necessities and cheap luxuries.
Bad Economy (Score:2)
The long tail theory is silly. (Score:2)
The thing about the long tail theory is that, on the flat end of the curve, you have very small overall returns, and a lot of other people making products with the same low capital and similar returns. so, basically, you have a lot of sucky stuff, then, a few things that are actually pretty good. You can see this with windows shareware as much as you can with web sites or anything else. A lot of stuff sucks, and only a small amount of it is actually good.
Clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
from the comments, the "long tail theory" is misunderstood by most slashdotters (at least, the few who are showing up today, most of whom, it seems, are in my "freaks" list judging from the comment moderations).
TFA was incredibly bring and unnecessarily wordy, as if the author had little to say and vast tracts of text to say it in.
Wikipedia refers to:
Obviously it's not referring to a boat or telecommunbications traffic. What it does refer to is a statistical curve on a graph. Take IQ. If your IQ is 100, you are on the top of the bell curve, the median. If your IQ is over 150 you are close to the extreme end of the "long tail".
The theory is that if you have warehousing costs, it isn't profitable to stock items that don't sell well. On the other hand, if your warehousing costs are zero, any sale is profitable.
The article (what I read of the boring thing) didn't say much of anything except "stuff one person will buy won't outsell stuff millions of people will buy"
In short, DUH. hardly profound.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure. I think that what it is saying is that, rather than being able to sell low volumes of stuff that you couldn't sell before, in fact you can't. You'll actually just sell a bit more of the stuff you sold very low volumes (or you didn't stock) before, but there's no magic new stuff that sells at low volume on the net.
Re:Clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
The article (what I read of the boring thing) didn't say much of anything except "stuff one person will buy won't outsell stuff millions of people will buy"
In short, DUH. hardly profound.
Well, it's hardly profound if you oversimplify it and misstate it.
The idea behind the long tail was that the massive variety that on-line retailers can offer, as compared to brick and mortar retailers who have severe shelf-space constraints, would lead people to find and buy more obscure stuff.
No one really expected the obscure stuff to outsell the popular stuff, but there was an expectation that some of the dollars formerly directed to popular stuff would get spread instead across the more obscure stuff. This would cause the sales of popular stuff to flatten a little and the "long tail" of obscure stuff to thicken a little.
That seems pretty reasonable on its face, but it's apparently not what happens.
It appears, in fact, that without the friction imposed by retailer shelf-space decisions the blockbuster effect is enhanced. When millions of products are available, people pay even more attention to peer recommendations, and that drives a more powerful blockbuster effect. The use of automated popularity-based recommendation software probably adds to the effect as well.
Is that profound? You decide. I think it's at least interesting.
Parent
Re:Clueless (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea was not only that the internet would enable sellers to tap into this market more effectively (through lower costs) but also that this would in turn lead to the tail becoming yet larger (both because increasing number of items sold means more potential sales, and because these rarer items may pick up additional momentum and sell more copies, thus giving more events with higher frequencies) as compared to the "blockbuster" events, which suffer due to increased choice.
More specifically, the issue is not "stuff one person will buy won't outsell stuff millions of people will buy" but rather "will many items purchased by a few people exceed the sales of a few items purchased by many people", given improved choice. The long tail hypothesis as presented in the Wired article says yes (or, at least, that the few-selling items will gain ground in the scenario presented by the internet) but evidence in this article says no. Perhaps still not the most shocking discovery in the world, but certainly a bit more than the trite discovery you make it out to be.
Also, as an aside, IQ is a very bad choice to illustrate the "long tail" because IQ is by definition normally distributed, and thus has a relatively short tail, as such things go - a long tail distribution is typically characterised by a significant slowdown in falloff as you move further from the median.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure how convincing the article's evidences are. For example, a study that says 0.4% of an online catalog are responsible for 80% of sales sounds damning. But where is the traditional sales outlet with 13 million items for us to compare it to?
I believe Wal-Mart stocks about 5000 CDs, or about 50,000 songs. That's roughly equivalent to the 52000 songs that constituted 80% of the online retailer's sales. But in Wal-Mart's case, 50,000 songs generate 100% of sales. So the dredges of that online ca
Seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
The markets studied in this work are notorious for being driven by short term fads. Online downloads are by predominantly ephemeral pop music, and a study of 14,000 teenagers? These are the people most influenced by peers and the 'so last week' attitude, They haven't had the time to explore and broaden their outlook.
Try getting a more diverse sample and I think that the long tail will look a lot fatter. People in their 30's and up have had time to develop far more diversified tastes and will have much more eclectic buying habits.
Pick a cohort of 14,000 boomers and you will see something very different.
They ignore personality (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a certain segment of the population that enjoys finding obscure stuff. I'm not sure of the size, but I'd guess it's about the same size as the introverted [wikipedia.org] segment of the population, around 25%, as the two behaviors are somewhat correlated. (i.e. folks who actively stray from the herd socially are more likely to express interest in consumables that are different from the herd's preferences) So, given that assumption, the drivers of a long tail market, "funky stuff seekers," could be overpowered by the general population.
On top of that, it's my guess that researchers in this area, as researchers in most areas, tend to be "funky stuff seekers" themselves. (I mean, it's their job to search and speculate on the edge of their field of study.) So, right off the bat, there's a bit of inherent bias in interpreting the effect of their cohort on the market. In other words, they're following the non-herd herd. :)
Another way to say it... (Score:2)
Doubts geometrically increase about the "long tail" :)
Long Tail != No More Blockbusters (Score:4, Insightful)
The article was generally ok, but clearly not completely understanding of what the "Long Tail" means. Of course, from what I've read (including the book itself) the interpretations and applications of the theory are rather fluid anyway.
The biggest issue I have with the article is that it seemed to be conveying that the "Long Tail" meant an end to blockbusters. It doesn't mean that at all. It just means that there's enough business in the "Long Tail" to make it profitable to sell items that weren't blockbusters given the low cost structures of Internet retailing. Amazon and iTunes both make hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on items that only sell 2 or 3 copies. With traditional retailers, space is a limited commodity and must be devoted to items that will sell in enough volume to justify carrying them.
Now, IANAPhd, and the article quotes quite a few that seem to disagree with the idea of the "Long Tail", but it seems the evidence they discuss is rather weak. Yes, people are influenced by others in their choices. Much of this comes from the vast history of humanity and our tendency to form social groups. The Internet has yet to truly begin to change humanity in the ways that it will. The key thing with respect to the article is the definition of what our peer groups are. Despite the global nature of the Internet, most of our peer influence is local. As more and more people around the world connect and begin to actually talk to others outside their current peer groups, those peer groups will expand and change. That is going to be a key driver in generating the diversity that the "Long Tail" predicts.
The "Long Tail" is only beginning because humanity's experience with the Internet and the interconnectedness that it brings is only beginning. Just because it hasn't completely happened doesn't mean that it's not happening.
But that's a simple Pareto distribution. (Score:3, Interesting)
... also known (in a simplified form) as "Zipf's Law". The most popular word occurs twice as often as the second popular, three times the third popular, four times the fourth etc.pp.
If you look at the 10% most popular words in a table, you will notice that the absolute share of the upper 10% increases, if you count longer and longer texts with more and more individual words.
With 10 different words you get, that the first 10% make up ~34% of all words.
With 100 different words you get already ~56,5% share for the first 10% of words.
With 1000 words we have 69,2% share for the first 10%, with 10000 we come to ~76,5% share.
Warez (Score:3, Insightful)
Case in point, warez sites. Troll them for 30 minutes and you'll be hard pressed to NOT find a flood of the same 10 movies, CDs, books etc. Even when stealing the product people do not go for the avant-garde or the art house, they go for the same 10 things that are hot.. NOW. Yes, you can find the other obscure stuff, but you have to dig long and hard for it. And in the end, it's the same very small circle of people that do that. The masses want what they want. It's called MASS APPEAL for a reason.
Long Tail is not an *automatic* win (Score:4, Insightful)
Long tails definitely work for pr0n (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember years ago when porn customers were happy enough to see a video of good looking people having sex. Now I have the impression that entire companies are surviving off the money of "long tail" customers who want to see shemales fuck midgets inside of a walk-in freezer.
And as we all know, where porn goes everyone else follows.
Re:What the?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
CAUTION! (Score:3, Funny)
Googling for the "long tail" in German may have unforeseen consequences.
Particularly if you do it at work.