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| The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More | 
 enlarge | Author: Chris Anderson
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $3.89
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Avg. Customer Rating:  179 reviews
Sales Rank: 18443
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1
ISBN: 1401302378
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.802
EAN: 9781401302375
ASIN: 1401302378
Publication Date: July 11, 2006
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| Customer Reviews:
Terrific book on sea change for business modeling August 30, 2006
26 out of 28 found this review helpful
Chris Anderson has written a thought-provoking book in The Long Tail. It's about the new economics of culture and commerce. While I enjoyed thinking about the main premise - that the Internet has dramatically changed the interplay between supply and demand - I once again concluded that the book could have been a lot shorter (possibly a result of my taking the book "Blink" to heart).
The title refers to the shape of a classic downward-sloping demand curve if you graphed popularity (x-axis) vs. demand (y-axis). Think about book industry where the demand for a few titles (bestsellers or even top 100) is very high, but demand for the 200,000th most popular book is sporadic at best. Consequently, Barnes & Noble stores can only carry books with a certain level of demand and will miss a lot of the niche topics that are out there.
But, because of the Internet, the demand captured in the 'long tail' of this curve, comprised of thousands of niche businesses, represents a vibrant business. For example, while the typical Barnes & Noble will carry 100,000 titles, Amazon offers 3.7 million and says that 25% of their sales come from books outside of the top 100,000 titles. They claim, and the premise of the book is, that as companies offer increased supply (because in the new Internet economy, they can), demand seems to follow supply and, in fact, increases.
Another related trend is the transition across business lines from 'hit' to 'niche', which is exemplified by the popularity of myspace.com, ebay, itunes and google (representing the long tail of advertising).
The six main themes of the book are:
1. In virtually all markets, there are far more niche goods than hits, as a result of improvements in the basic tools of production (i.e. Internet).
2. The costs of reaching these niches is now falling dramatically thanks to digital distribution, search and a critical mass of broadband technology.
3. There are a range of tools - from recommendations to rankings (think search) that help to shift demand down the long tail, and help people find useful/relevant niches.
4. The effect of all of this is that the demand curve will eventually flatten, with the hits becoming relatively less popular and the niches growing in popularity.
5. All of the niches add up to comprise a market that rivals the hits.
6. The internet can reveal a natural shape of demand, undistorted by distribution bottlenecks, scarcity of information and limited choice of shelf space.
I would recommend this book to all those interested in a well thought out premise on how the internet has radically altered many business models due to various supply and demand characteristics and the ability to exploit demand that would previously not have been profitable.
 If you're interested in the future of culture, technology, or business, read this book July 6, 2006
20 out of 30 found this review helpful
Now that people can find more niche products, the market of niches is huge. "The Long Tail" offers a fascinating glimpse of how technology could make mass markets smaller while niche markets expand.
How did we get here? Online music services and Internet bookstores, with their infinite virtual shelf space, can stock every product. Brick-and-mortar shops, with scarce space, must concentrate on hits. So it's no mystery why certain Long Tail businesses - like digital music - have taken off. It's a lot more tempting to choose from 3 million songs at iTunes starting at 99 cents, compared to choosing from 60,000 tracks at Wal-Mart starting at $12.
The question is, does this lead to more aggregate sales, or merely a shift from the head of the tail (the hits) to the Long Tail (the niches)? Are Internet retailers creating new demand, or simply taking share from old brick-and-mortar businesses?
"The Long Tail" does show how niche opportunities are popping up everywhere because the Internet has enabled low-cost (or no-cost) reach into those markets. According to Anderson, software-driven recommendations - like Amazon's book suggestions or Netflix's movie recommendations -- rival word-of-mouth:
"Recommendations have all the demand-generation power of advertising, but at virtually no cost. If Netflix suggests a film to you based on what it knows about your taste and what others thought of that film, it can be more influential than a generic billboard aimed at the broadest possible audience."
The main ideas in "The Long Tail" have been around for years, but Anderson puts it all into context beautifully. But he overreaches by implying that Long Tail economics applies everywhere. The discussion of digital music is convincing. No doubt, iPods and downloading has driven the Long Tail in music. The reasons are obvious: people prefer portable songs for 99 cents instead of paying $18 for a CD with one or two good songs.
But digital music is different from other products. Downloading a song for 99 cents is an impulse entertainment purchase. Does the Long Tail apply to books equally? Will students buy more textbooks simply because more titles are available? Will fiction readers buy more mysteries and discover new authors simply because a recommendation for them turns up on Amazon?
Anderson declares blockbuster economics obsolete. But in the film and book worlds, the hits still rule. The Harry Potters and the Da Vinci Codes sell more every year. Isn't it ironic that "The Long Tail," a book about the death of hits, is a monster bestseller? The Internet hasn't repealed the 80 / 20 rule yet.
These quibbles aside, I recommend "The Long Tail." It's the best business book I've read in the past 10 years. You might not agree with everything in it, but it will get you thinking. If you're involved with content, retailing, or advertising, it's a must-read.
 Good ideas, but trades "hipness" for accuracy in places July 15, 2006
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
This is an important book, and its also an easy read. It's a must-read for anyone who works in media, retail (whether physiscal or e-commerce), or supply chain management, or who thinks they might do so some day. I would also recommend it to general audiences.
I cannot give it a higher rating because of the following quibbles with Anderson's writing and ideas:
1) Anderson's writing still reads like magazine journalism (it especially betrays his time at _The Economist_), and therefore doesn't "stretch" very well into book-length material. The repetion and upbeat, example-laden style do a disservice, in that they encourage skimming.
2) In the chapter on "The Short Head," Anderson is foolishly optimistic about the "abundance" of the long tail/e-comm world, going so far as to say that classical economics' central theorem -- that finite resources need to be allocated among infinite wants and needs -- is no longer valid. But resources are still scarce: if they weren't, Amazon would not charge you any money to deliver a copy of Anderson's book to your house!
3) Anderson offers a rose-colored description of e-comm "filters" and the way that they can bring customers from best-sellers into the long tail. I have had lots of frustrating experiences, for example, with Amazon's recommendations, which tend to push me further down into "niches" than I want to go, don't always recognize that once you've bought a Penguin Classic you won't be interested in the Everyman Library edition of the same book, and don't make lateral connections between niches that would be obvious to anyone browsing in a physical bookstore. Similarly, searching for the most current edition of a reference or textbook can be frustrating -- reviews are not carried over from the previous edition, editions that are 10 years out of date may be ranked ahead of the current edition, etc. (These are the frustrations of someone who has been on the 'Net for 15 years and works with e-commerce technology all the time; how my parents fare on Amazon, I dare not guess.) I say this not as a condemnation of Amazon's technology, which is constantly (and usefully) evolving, but merely to point out that e-commerce in general is not as user-friendly as Anderson depicts it.
4) I find the chapter on Wikipedia et. al. as "the long tail of content" to be the least persuasive; I would have preferred it if Anderson had stuck to his original scope (sales), and not taken a right turn into content creation/product development.
Overall, this is a fine book and it deserves the attention it has received.
Intriguing Treatise on Helping Consumers Sift Through the Noise to Meet Their Specialized Needs July 18, 2006
15 out of 20 found this review helpful
As we learned in our marketing classes from days of yore, businesses have historically ignored everything below a certain cut-off part because it was considered economically non-viable to meet such specialized needs in the marketplace. That's why it's reassuring that our more idiosyncratic buying behaviors as consumers are finally translating in aggregate into economics of abundance, whether it be obscure books, rarefied recordings or DVDs of movies long forgotten by anyone else. In his incisive, surprisingly entertaining book, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, argues that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.
Obviously this is not revolutionary thinking at this point. Online commerce sites like eBay, Amazon, Netflix and iTunes have flourished by developing to such a point where they can tap rather easily into the market of the Long Tail, where according to Anderson, 80% of total consumers are. His musings cover the business and sociological phenomenon that started with the revelation that a handful of weblogs have many links going into them versus the rest, millions of weblogs, which have only a handful of links going into them. This apparent imbalance points to a marketing opportunity for potential e-commerce companies should they decide to tackle the issues around scale needed to conquer it. Otherwise, as we know firsthand, the Long Tail becomes indecipherable noise. Enter search engines like Google AdWords which has become a vital filtering mechanism to get through the noise. Other filtering options followed - social media recommendations, tagging, social bookmarking, blogs and online communities - all to help move us toward what we want to know and choose to purchase.
The author gives most of the credit to entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos who figured this out in 1994 with the introduction of Amazon as an online bookseller. It has since expanded into a number of areas from CDs to now groceries. Clearly, Bezos has led the rest of us to see how the Internet has given us unprecedented ability to find products never before available so quickly and easily. For Amazon, in particular, it's important to note that the pursuit of Long Tail opportunities starts with an item of popularity. The helpful Amazon recommendations drive people down that tail, but they enter from the top where an item of recognition begins them on their trek toward items that are more obscure.
The book is most fascinating when Anderson shares the recent genesis of the Long Tail phenomenon in ways that are quite relatable, in particular, the decline of network radio and TV channels as potential revenue sources. The resulting blandness found on these outlets has to do with the deliberate avoidance of niche market programming that does not meet their profitability thresholds. Consequently, the availability of MP3 and XM radio makes standard radio a less attractive option based more on convenience. The same can be said of the original three broadcast networks and their loss of audience to cable and premium-pay channels. The days of one-size-fits-all are apparently numbered, and unless the larger broadcasting corporations are aware of that, they are in for staggering losses.
 A nice magazine article stretched into a book. September 13, 2006
15 out of 22 found this review helpful
I've never been too keen on the "I think I'll say the same thing over-and-over again till I have a book" theory of writing. There are a few interesting tidbits interspersed that do make the book somewhat interesting, so I give it 2 stars.
The basic premise of the book is old news -- that the internet has enabled a new business model that allows a greater variety of goods to be sold than a traditional brick & mortar store can. The demand is there for small quantities of thousands of items a brick & mortar store can't afford to stock. And you can afford to sell an enormous variety of "virtual" goods (like downloadable music).
If this is "news" to you, I suggest you read the book.
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