[HN Gopher] Where did the long tail go? ___________________________________________________________________ Where did the long tail go? Author : jger15 Score : 228 points Date : 2022-06-26 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (tedgioia.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (tedgioia.substack.com) | agnosticmantis wrote: | For those curious about terminology who like me may not know, the | tail in 'long tail' does not refer to tail of a probability | density/mass function, but rather the tail of a rank-size | distribution which is closer to a (reversed) quantile function: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank%E2%80%93size_distribution | fweimer wrote: | It's curious to bring up Amazon and AWS in this context, without | noticing the myriad of SKUs that AWS offers. One could argue that | all of them are virtual, so they don't really matter, but there | is certainly a certain paralysis of choice when it comes to | instance types, and it must also make it more difficult for AWS | to schedule customer workloads efficiently. | cudgy wrote: | "Not only has Netflix sharply reduced the number of movies it | offers on its streaming platform, but now has a lot of | competitors (Disney, Apple, Paramount, etc.) that are also | tightly managing the titles they feature." | | Doesn't this explain why much of Netflix content has been | removed. Owners of that content removing it from Netflix to | feature it on their new streaming networks? The content is still | available just not through a single massive aggregator like | Netflix was in the past. | hoseja wrote: | Here's a guy restoring vintage mechanical watches as a hobby, | with over 600 patrons: | https://www.youtube.com/c/WristwatchRevival | dixego wrote: | Some people have already mentioned several problems with the | article, but there's a thing that's not really discussed that I'd | like to know more about: how many of the people on the "creation" | side of the Long Tail i.e. the movie makers, the musicians, the | writers, are actually making a living out of finding their own | small niche? I have to imagine there can't be that many. | rossdavidh wrote: | I think the crux of the matter is, how many creators were | making a living before? Also not that many. We're comparing one | business model that was broken (for the vast majority of | creators) to another that is also broken. | | It seems abundantly clear to me that there are way more TV | shows and music acts with global audience than there were | before. This doesn't mean they make a decent living. | mikewarot wrote: | Old person (58) perspective -- You don't remember what it was | like before the internet. We had a (1) local newspaper, Channels | 2,5,7,9,11 and 32 on the TV. The most artistic things available | on TV were William Alexander, Julia Child, and The Woodwright's | shop. | | There was an explosion of things when VHS and Cable TV showed up, | but still... the variety wasn't that great because they had to | satisfy mass audiences. | | We've now got the long tail. If you want to watch a person clear | out plugged drains for amusement, there's Post10. If you want to | watch the machining of metal, there's MrPete222, ThisOldTony, | ClickSpring, etc. If you want to learn about math, 3Blue1Brown, | Mathologer, etc. There's PeriodicVideos, etc. | | And the Podcasts... so many podcasts. The tail is long and wild | and wonderful. | | If there's something you're interested in, there's a niche | somewhere exploring it. | hinkley wrote: | Bob Ross and some old German guy painting on PBS would | challenge Roy Underhill's Dad Jokes any day. | | If you want to watch someone swear about power tools, using | swears you didn't even know existed, AvE. And if that's not | weird enough for you, watch an ex-felon with a _deep_ Chicago | accent talk about plants on Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't. | mikewarot wrote: | AvE is awesome... I have zero idea why he ends with keep your | * in a vice, though. | mikewarot wrote: | One thing does suck, though... the elimination of social | sharing of bookmarks, music, videos, etc. For example, when | Napster was a thing, I started buying 2-5 CDs per payday | because I was discovering so much great stuff. They they (the | record companies) started comparing the sharing of music with | Piracy of Ships on the High Sea, and suing customers... and | things imploded. F*ck the record companies! | | Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome | way to discover interesting things because people actually | shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it got | killed | | This trend repeats over and over as too much capital seeks too | few resources. 8( | 0898 wrote: | I'm always surprised and intrigued when people recall | discovering music through Napster. All I remember is using it | as a pirate search engine for songs that I already knew I | wanted. | | How did Napster work as a music discovery tool? Obviously | there was some aspect I was missing out on. | mikewarot wrote: | Before it got weird, you could look and see all the music a | given person was sharing.... and that's how I found some | amazing stuff I'd never heard on the mainstream radio | stations. | | I figured it was the right thing to do to actually buy the | music, so I was doing that. Somewhere I've got a few | hundred CDs on spindles that I bought retail at full price. | tomcam wrote: | > when Napster was a thing, I started buying 2-5 CDs per | payday | | You and no one else. Lars Ulrich was right. | | Practically speaking it could be that bands' doing it all | themselves may be an actual improvement, or may be a wash. | Hard to tell. at least they have better control over their | intellectual property. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | _> Lars Ulrich was right_ | | Which reminds me of this classic: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeKX2bNP7QM | | In my case, I didn't buy CDs, but I _did_ buy _lots_ of | singles. I was probably one of the earlier iTunes | customers, and LimeWire and RantRadio were where I found my | music. | nindalf wrote: | Are you looking for a site where people share interesting | links on a variety of subjects? Perhaps we could make it even | better if we had high quality discussion of those links. But | of course, we should have good moderation of the submissions | and comments so folks stay on topic. Maybe we could bootstrap | the site by appealing to a small subculture, like "news for | hackers". | | Yes, if only there was a site like this. | redmen wrote: | ghaff wrote: | >Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome | way to discover interesting things because people actually | shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it | got killed | | There are still social bookmarking sites. However: | | 1. Relatively speaking, very few people use them | | 2. Even those of us who have been using them since delicio.us | mostly don't bother sharing | | The sharing is probably mostly on Twitter these days. | kristopolous wrote: | It's a different model of consumption. | | Systems based on votes are based inherently on popularity. | | Whether that's direct or whether it's a FoaF operation, such | as "those who like x also enjoy y" - it's still a popularity | system. | | All popularity systems centralize and are extremely hostile | to divergences and counterintuitive things. | | It'd be like if you asked the bedeviling Monty Hall problem, | took a survey of the most common answer and only presented | that one while the correct one gets hidden and downvoted. The | centralizing feedback loop is because you're now reinforcing | the most common wrong answer as the right one and thus the | noise becomes the signal. | | The failure of these systems is it only recognizes and pushes | up those who knows how to be popular and not experts or | creators. It regurgitates commonality. | | There's other ways. You can for instance, find a movie you | like then see what studio made it, the director involved, the | whatever - sound engineer, then browse out from there. It's a | version of the Monty Hall problem where you go "let's only | pay attention to what most _mathematicians_ say " | | My favorite analogy for this is if you went to a beginner's | karate/yoga/physical therapy class on the first day and took | a survey of a proper punch/movement and considered the | instructor's opinion as an equal vote with the 20 other first | day people and ? went with whatever the plurality was. Or you | went to the doctor's office and along with the doctor, | surveyed the patients in the waiting room what their opinion | of your ailment was. Or a foreign language class and had the | other students guess on a translation and assign the fluent | instructor's answer the same weight. | | No really, that's how we've structured most content curation | on the internet. Exactly like that. | | It's fine for general purposes but completely fails for the | narrowband - naive equal democracy and systems weighted in | popularity are terrible institutions where specialized | expertise is desired because it occludes expert knowledge | systems and networks and swaps it out for popularity systems | and tribes | seanp2k2 wrote: | If you want to build your own keyboard, now there are a billion | parts easily available and tons of instructional videos on it. | When I was a kid, model aircraft were fun, but you'd either go | to the local hobby store or look through the Tower Hobby | catalog. People built kits or sometimes made things themselves, | and a lot of really interesting techniques were passed down | through clubs and mailing lists. Now with the drone scene, | there are many many more parts to choose from, all kinds of | simulators and flight assist technology to almost completely | avoid the expensive and time-consuming build-fly-crash loop, | tons of resources in forums, videos, discord servers (I guess | we did have IRC back in the day which is part of how I learned | programming). | | The long tail has been growing since the 90s, but consumerism | has been growing even faster. | ge96 wrote: | A weird one is watching people fix the hooves on horses, | something about is captivating. | addicted wrote: | How was live music and entertainment though? | | I mean, stuff that wasn't available because the technology | didn't exist was obviously not as good. | | And none of the channels you've mentioned are counter culture. | 3blue1brown, Mathologer, etc are a combination of being able to | do stuff because animation is easy and cheap to do, but they | are hardly long tail at this point. | majormajor wrote: | Yeah, look at the US population share of pre-cable, pre- | internet things like I Love Lucy or Elvis. Nothing these days | is even _close_ to dominating pop culture in the same way. | | The author doesn't see it because they're swimming in it (even | Substack is part of it) and it's so common that it's no longer | noteworthy. They pay attention just to what's happening | _inside_ tentpole motion pictures that they ignore how much | bigger the world of content outside of them has gotten. There | 's no monolithic "counterculture" because there's now thousands | of them. | Gimpei wrote: | Agreed! Television is so much better. Comics are better. | Obscure music from all over the world is readily available | rather than being stuck with top 40, solid gold, American | bandstand. Board games are more variegated; beer culture has | exploded; coffee tastes good. Pretty much everything that was | dull and bland in my youth now has a rich fan culture. Kids | today don't know how good they've got it. | cs137 wrote: | _Pretty much everything that was dull and bland in my youth | now has a rich fan culture. Kids today don't know how good | they've got it._ | | If only they had the gumption to time travel and get cushy | BoomerJobs instead of gig-economy nightmare labor under tight | quotas and constant surveillance, they'd even have the time | and money to enjoy it. | ithkuil wrote: | Human perception adapts to everything and turns everything into | "normal". | | Today all those things you mentioned are "mainstream", thus | where are the counter culture things we used to have? | cheriot wrote: | 100% agreed | | > I'm not saying that all those 'underground fringes' that | Anderson celebrated have disappeared--I'm merely claiming that | they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in | modern history. | | The author seems to think about counter culture in terms of | large groups like the bohemians and beatniks. Instead, we have | an unlimited supply of niche communities people can join. Seems | pretty great to me. | soderfoo wrote: | The author alludes to something that resonated with me. I | think the point he is trying to make is that even a lot of | independent art is homogenized and tired because its | underpinnings are more tied to a hustle-culture mindset than | to actually asking something of the experiencer. | Dan_Sylveste wrote: | >Instead, we have an unlimited supply of niche communities | people can join. Seems pretty great to me. | | I think the issue is with the discoverability of those | communities. When they're so small and niche and there are so | many of them, discoverability suffers. There's a curation | element that's missing and that algorithms driven by / | manipulated by commercial pressure don't provide. | | I don't think we have a modern day replacement for John Peel, | for example. We have tons of content (soundcloud etc) but the | few people sorting the wheat from the chaff don't seem to be | able to muster an audience. The art/talent of curation is | much undervalued. | twiceaday wrote: | I spend hours every week watching a British man solve sudoku | variation puzzles, as do his half a million subscribers. Hard | to imagine this happening before. | | https://youtu.be/ejhtYYvUs5M?t=241 | wrp wrote: | During the Rubik's Cube craze of the early 1980s, people | would gather round to watch a skilled person solve one. I | seem to recall even seeing it on TV. Behavior is the same, | technology has just allowed a change in scale. | YeezyMode wrote: | This is beautiful. | ghaff wrote: | >It pains me to say this--because the Long Tail was sold to us as | an economic law that not only predicted a more inclusive era of | prosperity, but would especially help creative people. | | My recollection is that Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" never | particularly promoted prosperity for those _in_ the long tail but | rather for the aggregators of the long tail. And that seems to | have happened to a large degree. | | Here's part of the blurb for Anderson's book: | | _Wired editor Anderson declares the death of "common culture"-- | and insists that it's for the best. Why don't we all watch the | same TV shows, like we used to? Because not long ago, "we had | fewer alternatives to compete for our screen attention," he | writes. Smash hits have existed largely because of scarcity: with | a finite number of bookstore shelves and theaters and Wal-Mart CD | racks, "it's only sensible to fill them with the titles that will | sell best." Today, Web sites and online retailers offer seemingly | infinite inventory, and the result is the "shattering of the | mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards." These | "countless niches" are market opportunities for those who cast a | wide net and de-emphasize the search for blockbusters._ | | That actually seems pretty accurate. Amazon and YouTube have done | just fine by the long tail. And the variety of streaming services | have pretty much fractured primetime network viewing and Top 40 | radio. Power laws are still in effect and small-time artists are | often doing even worse financially than they used to, and even | some of the aggregators (e.g. Netflix) have their own struggles. | incrudible wrote: | Even if Amazon was profitable selling goods (it is not), its | approach is to let marketplace sellers figure out which | products sell well, then it starts sells those items itself. | Amazon is chasing the short tail. | | Streaming services are fractured, but individually almost all | of their revenue comes from blockbusters. Attempts at original | content are killed quickly when they fail to deliver bigly. | Netflix is particularly guilty of this. | | The prediction in the book does not pan out. Today _more than | ever_ , the money goes to the top. | ghaff wrote: | There is a long tail and consumers get a lot of value from | that long tail. But I don't wholly disagree that--in addition | to the creators in the long tail not making much--the | aggregators can make relatively little from it either | compared to the blockbusters on the left hand side of the | curve. | | So I think the observation that a long tail exists was | absolutely correct but the claim of financial value from it | is a mixed bag. (Anderson was also largely incorrect in his | claims about the end of theory. | https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ ) | mattmanser wrote: | He actually explicitly mentions Amazon and Netflix as counter | examples of what you've said. | | Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not | and will never be profitable, they have been saved by aws | | Netflix - has cut the number of movies on offer dramatically, | cutting out the long tail, and adopted a strategy of chasing | blockbuster TV shows | | It's worth reading the whole article, it is pretty good. | | As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things | and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger | things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? | Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me. | Izkata wrote: | > As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger | things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of | stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King | or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me. | | It's also losing sight of books. There's so, so many books | out there, it could be called even more fractured than modern | TV/streaming, and yet big hits happened. When I was in school | in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone at least knew of (if | not was a fan of) Animorphs, Goosebumps, Redwall, Harry | Potter (before the movies), etc. | ghaff wrote: | Of course things are much more fractured than they used to | be. The audience for Stranger Things or GoT is minuscule | compared to something like "Must See TV" on NBC Thursdays in | the past. I think you might be surprised at the number of | people who haven't heard of Stranger Things and certainly | haven't watched. | | It's fair that Netflix doesn't really carry long tail content | --never did carry the longest tail stuff and now that content | owners want more money in general and there's a lot more | competition for subscribers it doesn't make sense to pay for | back catalog stuff that others own. YouTube and TikTok are | better examples. | | It seems obvious that there _is_ a long tail. But neither | Anderson or most anyone else claimed that being in the long | tail was a path to riches. And while I 'm not sure it's valid | to write off Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, etc., it's probably fair | to say that the long tail has mostly not been a pile of gold | for the aggregators either. But it does exist. | jamiek88 wrote: | The long long tail of tv is now the likes of PlutoTV and | Tubi etc. free streaming with channels dedicated to for | example, the Beverley hillbillies ! | mcv wrote: | Yeah, but wasn't Squid Game Netflix's last blockbuster? | That's certainly not your standard Hollywood-style | blockbuster. So that means it does offer a way for weird | niche stuff to get really big. | moate wrote: | IDK that you can say Squid Games isn't part of a trend when | Korean pop culture and arts are having a pretty big moment | around the world (K-pop is massive, Parasite kicked ass at | the Oscars) and EVERYONE wants a dystopia story because of | how the shitty the world feels. | | Squid Game doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere, and is | actually pretty derivative (go re-watch Running Man or | Battle Royale). | sitkack wrote: | > claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable | | If this is true, then isn't the retail side effectively | removing all the oxygen from the ecosystem? This sounds | massively stagnating, the combination of not-profitable and | extremely efficient. | ghaff wrote: | Even before Amazon a fair number of big box chains removed | a lot of oxygen from the retail ecosystem. No small number | of those chains themselves went out of business--yes, in | part because of Amazon. (Also Walmart.) | | I don't really buy the "will never be profitable" part | although perhaps less so than AWS. | tgflynn wrote: | If AWS is as profitable as he says there must be a huge | opportunity in offering lower cost cloud infrastructure. | fweimer wrote: | I find it curious that the other two top-brand public | clouds do not undercut AWS significantly in areas like | network bandwidth charges, when other operators can offer | similar service it vastly reduced cost. This does look | like a market failure, and I don't know why we are in | this situation. Maybe the top brands are just very, very | strong? | encoderer wrote: | I think you underestimate the scale of how "short tailed" | everything used to be. | | Yes yes tiger king, stranger things, etc. these things are | popular. | | In 1983 over 50% of the entire United States watched the last | episode of MASH live as it aired on NBC. And people talked | about it for 10+ years. | kristianc wrote: | Not only that, but the long tail has been much much more | representative than the days of the short tail ever was. | | Everyone knew that there was a huge audience for hip hop, | but we've only seen how huge that audience was since it | came to dominate streaming charts. | fourthark wrote: | Mid tail | mikewarot wrote: | I thought it was great when Klinger got married. | | This nightmare of Hawkeye's is something I'll never forget. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3_iRh2Ryk | simonebrunozzi wrote: | > Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is | not and will never be profitable | | Far, far from reality. Amazon retail can be very profitable - | the amount of data, arbitrage, and scale is just unmatched by | any other company. | lotsofpulp wrote: | > even some of the aggregators (e.g. Netflix) have their own | struggles. | | Netflix's stock price is still pretty high considering their | product. | | Disney market cap is $180B, Comcast is $180B, Netflix is $85B, | Warner Bros Discovery is $35B. Fox/Viacom/Paramount are in the | $15B to $20B range. Everyone else is much smaller. | | Disney and Comcast have other businesses than selling media, | and Disney has particularly strong brands. Netflix's content | does not seem much more compelling than HBO's (Warner Bros | Discovery), but it does have global presence. | Retric wrote: | Netflix might be overvalued, but those other companies aren't | in great places. | | Disney for example is in a tough place in terms of growth | which really hurts their market cap. | | Take say their parks, they can't significantly expand, open | up new locations, or significantly raise prices and those | parks have the risk of another shutdown etc. ESPN similarly | dominates their niche but as a middle man they could lose | major contracts. Again profitable but not a lot of room for | growth. Disney+ is what their 3rd streaming service and eats | into existing profits. Why buy an MCU blue-ray when 3 months | of streaming costs the same. | | They executed their purchases of Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars | reasonably well but audiences are getting saturated and there | isn't a lot of franchises like that to keep buying. Worse | they can't seem to get new franchises off the ground. Frozen | for example was a big hit but they ran it and other promising | IP into the ground. | samatman wrote: | Objectively they've bungled Star Wars, it remains to be | seen if they can get out of the woods with the amount of | hostility they've created. Without the Mandalorian the | situation would be dire. | | Pixar literally didn't miss for the entire independent era, | the occasional lackluster movie isn't going to alienate | their core demographic, which is parents. Marvel is of | course printing money with no end in sight, but this is a | two out of three thing imho. | Retric wrote: | I agree Disney's handling of the Star Wars was a dumpster | fire from a story standpoint. | | However, the Star Wars acquisition has been extremely | profitable financially and the IP is still quite | valuable. 2.1% of the company + 2.21 Billion was easily | worth it. Theme park attractions, toys, etc just let them | leverage IP in ways few companies can match in the short | term. | fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: | People keep showing up to spend a billion dollars at the | box office for Star Wars movies. Internet discourse isn't | necessarily a good indicator for the success of | mainstream movies. | samatman wrote: | The discourse surrounding Marvel is ten times as grumpy, | Star Wars is simply underperforming. The Mandalorian was | a decent save, but they're out of films that a bunch of | people will go see no matter what, now that the core | storyline is told. | | There's time to turn the ship around, but if the next two | cinema releases are duds the franchise is in real | trouble. Marvel can blow a movie any time they like. | | It's Disney, I expect they'll squeeze profit out of the | IP for a long time to come, but that might end up | dominated by short animated series aimed squarely at | kids. Hard to say, Favreau understands what Star Wars is | and hopefully they see that and scale it. | lotsofpulp wrote: | I agree, I do not know if any media sellers have | sufficiently high and resilient cash flow to be worth | $100B+, or even close to it. | | Well, except Apple and Amazon, but that is not because of | the media. | soneca wrote: | > _" I'm merely claiming that they have less cultural impact than | at almost any point in modern history. To operate on the fringe | is almost akin to wearing an invisibility cloak from one of those | Harry Potter stories."_ | | Despite this being the central claim of the article, the author | doesn't make any effort to defend, explain, or even list examples | of that claim. They state it as a fact. And I disagree with that | central foundation, so the article is kind of useless to me. I | learned nothing from it. I still think the long tail of creators | and artists have more influence in the society than they had in | the 2000s and before. | | The article is a long effort to brag that the author was right | about something a long time ago. But, without the premise above, | I think they are wrong. The blockbuster being dead prediction was | grossly wrong, but that along doesn't support the claim above. | Neither noticing that Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify earn more | money from the big things. That doesn't necessarily mean that the | small creator earns less money. The article also ignore about | small creators earning money and reach from Substack, Patreon, | Kickstarter, Twitch, YouTube, etc. | ghaff wrote: | >I still think the long tail of creators and artists have more | influence in the society than they had in the 2000s and before. | | Yes, even if discovery of things in the long tail, much less | creators profiting from it, is difficult, it's hard to accept | the claim that it's _more_ fringe today than it was 25 years | ago when it might not have been created at all or would only | have been shared with a small, local audience. | zuminator wrote: | At the very least this essay is disingenuous. Gioia claims,"The | Hollywood studios are even more obsessed with the Short Tail than | the streaming platforms. Back in 2006, Anderson predicted the | _End of the Blockbuster_ --but what has happened since then? " | | What Anderson actually wrote: "For _music_ , at least, this looks | like the end of the blockbuster era." [my italics] | | Music and film are entirely different. For one thing, a newly | released song on Spotify is entirely identical, bar recency, to a | 30 year old song, they're both 4Mb aac files or whatever. Whereas | the theatrical release at a cinema is qualitatively a much | different experience to streaming on your iPad, even if the | underlying media is identical. Anyway by their nature, just | looking at contemporary theatrical releases in isolation doesn't | work, because the long tail argument is about the back catalog | and niche releases. If you include the back catalog, i.e. | theatrical releases + streaming movies + DVDs purchases/rentals, | then long tail still holds, and you can see that by the steadily | decreasing share of revenue that the theater has versus all | outlets. The North American domestic box office has plummeted | since COVID, but taking the last normal year, 2019, it stood at | $11 billion. Compare that with Netflix revenue of $20 billion. | Not apples to apples, since Netflix is global, it has its own | blockbusters, and its catalog is increasingly non-theatrical in | appeal. But there are also plenty of other streaming services. | All things considered, I think it's fair to still conclude that | that smaller, niche product and back catalog continues to eat | away at an increasing share of total revenue. | | Parenthetically, I just have to say I'm annoyed by Gioia's whole | "Honest Broker" shtick. A true straight shooter doesn't have to | advertise their honesty, they just speak their minds and others | will see the truth for themselves. It feels a bit astroturfy how | much play this guy gets on HN. For hot takes on a 16 year old | book? | Apocryphon wrote: | One thing absent from this discussion is all of these platforms- | Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, _can choose to foster the long | tail or not._ Meaning, they are so vast and full of content that | they must internally promote their content via internal ads, | product spotlights, deals, and the almighty algorithm. | | So perhaps that's worth examining. These aren't neutral | marketplaces. They can actively promote the short tail | blockbuster content, or reach into the long tail and highlight | obscure choices. | mindvirus wrote: | I hear what the author is trying to say, and I might be missing | the point, but it seems counter to what I've seen. In agreement | that it's important though. Blockbuster movies by definition | aren't the long tail. | | There are tons of examples of it: | | - music, as the author points out. Kpop popularity in the west is | probably a big example, but also artists getting famous on | SoundCloud. | | - video games are another place where there are a ton of indie | studios doing their thing. The other day there was a post about | Zachtronics. | | - Books, we've seen several self publishing success stories on | Kindle and others. Amazon claims more and more people are making | over $50K on KDP. | | - products, we see tons of success on Kickstarter and similar | places. Pebble or Remarkable are two examples that come to mind. | | My take, maybe counter to the author, is that the long tail is | there but it's huge, but any individual thing - product, game, | etc - seems small, unless it's a hit in which case it's not the | tail anymore. | zumu wrote: | I generally agree, but with one caveat. | | > music, as the author points out. Kpop popularity in the west | is probably a big example, but also artists getting famous on | SoundCloud. | | Kpop is manufactured to formula by record labels and is being | aggressively marketed worldwide. It is very big business and | increasingly mainstream. It is analogous to 'blockbuster | movies', demonstrating the consolidation of content providers | and world interests. Soundcloud artists on the other hand are | very long tail. | | This is a good example of the dichotomy I see going on. The | long tail is still alive and well, but there's a bit of | consolidation in the traditional media industries, Hollywood, | the big music labels, AAA games, etc. While, self publishing | platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, Patreon, Steam, etc. are | where the long tail thrives. | wongarsu wrote: | The last one or two decades really solved a lot of distribution | problems of the long tail. You can not make a decent living | playing live medieval tavern music on Twitch (and supplement | with income from Spotify). Or make a living drawing fanart with | DeviantArt and Patreon, publish your indie game on Steam and | consoles with relative ease, get books printed in runs of 100 | copies, instead of tens of thousands. | | The thing the author misses is that they are looking at what | big companies are doing. But big companies aren't well suited | for serving the long tail, because there are fewer economies of | scale in doing that. The vast majority of supply in the long | tail comes from individuals or small companies, often people | who start it as a hobby and notice there's enough money to do | it full time. | | And the economics work out, because the more underserved a | niche the higher the prices that are acceptable. A teddy bear | at the corner shop is $10, but plushies in fandoms where little | official merchandise exists go for ten to fifty times that. | syntheweave wrote: | I agree and see the long tail primarily as a "phase shift" | from firms back to individuals. | | Niche works used to be indulged by media corporations as | gambles. They would let the whole thing be fully produced | right from the beginning, though often compromising authorial | vision in the process or pulling the plug early. Then | audiences would gamble with cash to view the work. | Occasionally one broke through and you had a surprise | blockbuster. | | Now much more is in the hands of the actual creator, and more | stuff is "view for free" and payment is more often driven by | secondary merchandising, creating community space or other | elements that are ancillary to the work. The average | production quality is lower and the medium is often platform | defined(social media engagement is now a major component of | audience building), but as a creator you have a gamut of | choices to stitch together into some business - often one | that bypasses gatekeepers. While blockbusters still exist, | they're "hollowed out" because most of their good ideas have | to be borrowed now. | | The actual market for the content only became bigger to the | extent that we can saturate our eyeballs. | JKCalhoun wrote: | > You can not make a decent living playing live medieval | tavern music on Twitch | | Typo? Did you mean "now" rather than "not"? | olalonde wrote: | To add to your examples, there are now a bunch of independent | content creators making a living from platforms like YouTube, | Twitch, OnlyFans, etc. | XCSme wrote: | I feel the same: the long tail is there but it's too long, so | it becomes very thin. There are A LOT more content creatores | today than 10 or 20 years ago. | api wrote: | This is the reality. The tail is much longer and thinner. | | I get the feeling that the author is mourning the great late | 20th century counterculture movements. They are worth missing | as they did produce a ton of creativity, but the thing is | that there were never many of them. | | There were maybe a dozen tops: hippies, hip hop, goth, rave, | punk, a few smaller or shorter lived ones. | | Today there are thousands. There is no identifiable | counterculture because there are too many to count and they | are always popping up and dying off. I guess you could say | there is one counterculture and it's the long tail itself. | | As usual William Gibson, the single most prophetic sci-fi | writer, got the feel of it (but not the specifics): | | "Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind | blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies | of need and gratification." - William Gibson, Neuromancer | | There's a dozen more quotes like that. That's the first one | that came to mind. | jrmg wrote: | The irony of writing an article about the long tail being a myth | on a niche substack blog... | hamiltonians wrote: | same for: | | 10,000 hours | | grit/growth mindset | | 1000 true fans | [deleted] | bryanlarsen wrote: | Netflix and Disney are the head. TikTok and YouTube are the tail. | The head may be bigger, but the tail is certainly thriving. | aaron695 wrote: | Most of the early internet pop culture ideas were very wrong. | | They had zero grounding in the reality around them. | | The subculture of saying the Internet is what they wanted it to | be was what everyone worshipped. Clay and Cory and co. | | Dreams like the Semantic web and "The Internet Perceives | Censorship as Damage and Routes Around It" | | Long tail being wrong is an interesting call. | | I'd say probably correct. It went mid tail. | | I have a "Birds aren't real tshirt" (I couldn't get a Red Dwarf | t-shirt pre internet) but zero t-shirts of local businesses. | | Don't care about bands down the road anymore but listen to | African hackers songs about 411. | | This topic needs more thought. It still might go from mid to long | tail. | selimthegrim wrote: | 419? | aaron695 wrote: | njharman wrote: | > "The Internet Perceives Censorship as Damage and Routes | Around It" | | That's true and actually happened. What was (and still is) | naive is people believe technology some how trumps "power". | That those in power won't use their power to remain in power. | | "Power perceives challenge to that power as damage and routes | around it" | | E.g. abuse copyright to silence, manipulate public outrage to | force social media to censor themselves, to enact "blue | checkmarks" and "trusted news sources", to clear cut our rights | in the name of "protecting" us from pedophiles or terrorism. | tharne wrote: | Fear not, the long tail is alive and well. It's just not where | the author is looking for it. This has to do with the flippening | that has taken place in recent history and has not been widely | acknowledged. | | For decades practically everything counter culture came from the | left, while the right represented the establishment. So much so | that we came to believe that the left _was_ by it 's very nature | counter-cultural, and the right _was_ by _it 's_ very nature pro- | establishment. | | But something funny happened along the way. The left become | dominant in virtually every cultural power center in America: the | media, music, film and TV, the tech giants, publishing, etc. The | problem is neither the left nor the right have genuinely digested | this change. You see high-powered attorney's and corporate execs | driving their 6-figure Telsa SUV's with "Resist" stickers on the | back, as if they were some sort of scrappy underdog sticking it | to "the man". | | There is a vibrant counter culture in America right now, it's | just mostly on the cultural and political right. Think of the | "intellectual dark web", or the fact that small indie right-wing | publishers have popped up and conservatives are trying to create | an alternative to big tech with things like Gab, Parler, and | Truth Social. A lot these things have, or will, fail, but some | will not. A lot of these things are also downright awful and | generally offensive, but they _are_ counter-cultural and designed | to appeal to the long part of the tail. | | There are even whole series of children's books designed for | conservatives. If a children's book about Amy Coney Barret isn't | the definition of a long-tail product, then I don't know what is. | | The author's mistake is that he doesn't realize that he and | people like him, _are_ the establishment so they don 't see a lot | of the stuff in the long tail, simply because it's not meant for | them and others living in the short tail of things. There's | nothing wrong with being part of the establishment, it's just | never been considered very cool, so everyone wants to think | they're counter cultural. | crmd wrote: | The long tail would be lucrative to middle class artists if my | monthly $9.99 (minus Spotify's profit) was divided evenly amongst | the tracks I streamed last month. But that is not how it works. | Instead, those artists get fractions of a penny so Spotify can do | 8-10 figure business development deals with top 20 artists and | their labels in order to get the blockbuster content. | hamstergene wrote: | The author has oversimplified complex world into something | simple, as simple as possible, and wrong. | | It costs almost nothing for a music service to add a niche album. | That's why they do it: if you type a search query in a foreign | language into US streaming account, you will find bands | irrelevant to 99.995% of US users. This music may have less | "groomed" metadata than the Short Tail, but there is little | reason for a streaming service to not want it. | | The same could be true for movies, but it's not. Maybe because | production costs a lot regardless of the movie will be successful | or not. Or because movies are for one-time consumption, unlike | music. Also copyright owners try to steal subscribers from | Netflix to their own app, which is easier to pull with several | studios than with millions of artists. | | YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, OnlyFans are examples of alive and | prospering Long Tail. | | I really doubt that Kindle store will ever start charging more | for publishing books that target less than two dozens of readers. | | Whatever is going on, it is most definitely not as trivial as | "living in the world of Short Tail". | lumost wrote: | The challenge is that any mechanism to pay for failures is | quickly disappearing for the knowledge economy. | | If you have an unpredictable hit/win rate, the historically best | strategy was to bulk up more hits/wins into a larger entity with | predictable returns. Many business models today either capitalize | on the transaction volume ala app stores or focus on lock in via | branding like the MCU. | | If you make an OK movie or app these days the value is | effectively 0. | anothernewdude wrote: | This is largely why I don't watch movies, TV or listen to new | music anymore. | | Everything seems either lazily targeted to some large group of | viewers, and the rest of production doesn't matter anymore. I'm | not even sure some of the creators of these things know why | people would like the paints their algorithms are telling them to | paint in the numbered areas. | oneoff786 wrote: | This takeaway is pretty much the exact opposite of what's going | on. The algorithmic content chases mass appeal and large | demographics. The long tail is niche independent artists doing | their own thing and is, for them, commercially really small. | mola wrote: | I'm not sure that's true. The short circuit between | production and feedback (YouTube studio analytics, etc) are | causing a lot of the small creators to optimize for whatever | fluke that got them famous, and then replicate it again and | again and again. It feels like what happened is that the | tools the big shots were using (test audiences etc) were | democratized and now most of the long tail is playing the | same game. Optimizing for some (local) lowest common | denominator and treating their creations as a commodities and | not as art. | abetusk wrote: | I think there's an interesting question (and answer) in this | article but the author doesn't make it. | | Here's what I believe to be the fundamental error the author is | making as highlighted by this throwaway line: | | """ ... The distribution is not quite that precise. Sometimes you | will see a 90/10 relationship or a 75/25 split. But the key | finding is that every activity is concentrated among heavy users | and popular products. """ | | If the split goes down to 60/40 (40% sales lead to 60% profits), | this starts getting into "real" money in terms of trying to | capture the other 40% of the profits. Any overhead in terms of | distribution, discovery, labor, rent, etc. will eat into that | profit pushing it towards more of a 80/20 rule, or even 90/10. | | The talk of "long tail" in this context is noticing that iTunes, | Netflix and Amazon don't need brick and mortar real estate, don't | need warehouses of inventory (in some cases), don't need | expensive distribution channels, etc. All those extra costs | diminish profits. If the marginal costs of storage and | distribution drop drastically this effectively changies the 80/20 | rule into a 60/40 one, allowing them to not only reduce the | reliance on "superstar" sellers by changing the proportion but | also access the remaining tail of consumers. | | To further highlight the author's misread, here's another | excerpt: | | """ The digital world hardly changes this equation. Even if | Amazon doesn't operate stores, it still has expenses (rent, | labor, etc.), not much different than a bookstore. """ | | I'm not sure Borders or Barnes and Nobles ever broke double digit | billions of worth. Amazon is values at over a trillion dollars. | | It's not that the author is incorrect, the equation is the same, | but the generalization of the equation and it's realization seems | to be lost on the author. The 80/20 rule can actually be 60/40. | To say that Amazon is not much different than a bookstore is like | saying a solar system is not much different than a galaxy. Yes, | they still obey rules of physics but the scale and scope of | relevant details are vastly different. | | But, this is all a guess on my part. I think it's easy enough to | debunk the article on various aspects. Mostly this can come down | to what a good definition of "long tail" is and what you're | actually trying to point out. | | I do think there is a question underlying the article that should | be answered. I think the better question is "Is the 80/20 rule a | convergent rule, or can it go down to 60/40 (say) and what are | the conditions in which this rule manifests?". | | There's also the question of how much resources to devote to | providing "long tail" access to whatever product you're selling | or market you're in and even if the ratio can be changed from | 80/20 to 60/40, say. | karaterobot wrote: | I don't agree with his interpretation. As I understand it, the | long tail as applied to business just means that there is a | significant chunk of the market made up of a big number of small | items. You wouldn't try to disprove this by showing that | blockbuster movie releases make up a huge portion of the movie | industry, or that Spotify is a big player in the music industry, | or that Amazon is a big player in the retail space, because the | long tail doesn't preclude those things. | | If you wanted to argue against the existence of a long tail, | you'd say something like "if Netflix got rid of everything except | a few, very successful movies, their subscription revenue | wouldn't change much", or "most people who pay for Spotify would | keep paying even if the least popular 95% of the artists left" or | "people don't value the fact that they can buy pretty much | anything they can think of on Amazon," all of which seem like | obviously incorrect statements (with no data on my part to back | that up). | | The existence of aggregators doesn't disprove the long tail, you | just have to talk about the long tail in terms of what people do | inside those aggregators. | iandanforth wrote: | I regularly watch economically prosperous content on youtube that | would have had zero chance of distribution 10 years ago. I also | watch available but not prosperous content that would never have | left people's imaginations or living-rooms. I have access to a | wealth and variety of content today that I didn't imagine when I | was in college. | | The long tail is alive and well and the OP is incorrect. | JKCalhoun wrote: | Yep, author doesn't even mention YouTube. I have found more art | and artists via YouTube than I have from Disney. | | He talks about the "long tail" but then turns around and talks | about mainstream (ha ha) companies like Netflix, talks about | "Hollywood", etc. The long tail is not going to come from | corporate America, and never was. | jollybean wrote: | Yes, but it's a much longer and flatter tail. | bricemo wrote: | Agree. This article is saying Head content is still king. That | is true. But The Long Tail wasn't necessarily about the long | tail being bigger than head. It was that long tail was viable | at all. | | I don't see how anyone can argue against there being more | choice than ever before across all sectors of products and | content. | ghaff wrote: | >But The Long Tail wasn't necessarily about the long tail | being bigger than head. It was that long tail was viable at | all. | | Anderson's point was somewhat different as I recall. It | wasn't that individual long tail content is necessarily | financially viable for its creators. (Which seems mostly true | even if there are some breakouts who wouldn't have existed at | least in the same form 25 years ago.) It's that long tail | content in aggregate could be financially viable for | distributors and other sellers--which seems at least somewhat | true. | | With a hindsight lens, you could argue that the long tail was | about profiting off the labor of free and low-paid content | creation--although a somewhat counterargument is that | consumers get a lot of value too and much of the content is | stuff that would never have seen the light of day at least | beyond a tiny circle of friends and fans in past times. | JKCalhoun wrote: | > It's that long tail content in aggregate could be | financially viable for distributors and other sellers-- | which seems at least somewhat true | | I don't disagree with that point, rather I never cared that | the long tail would be "financially viable for | distributors". In fact, I suppose I prefer that it is not | viable for them. | | Long live the long tail! | ghaff wrote: | Well, if it weren't financially viable for the | distributors, the long tail wouldn't really be accessible | beyond mostly local audiences--as was the case before the | mid 90s or so. | | If long tail content isn't financially viable for | YouTube, then YouTube either doesn't exist, charges for | hosting, or gatekeeps. | galaxyLogic wrote: | I think what happened is that since YouTube makes its | business with advertisements which are "free" for the | users, users get accustomed to the idea that content should | be free. That lowers the quality of the music because why | invest more in quality than what is needed to provide free | convent. | | If nobody is paying for it except with their eye-balls how | much should you expect to profit, and thus how much should | you invest in producing your content? Not much hence | quality goes down and everybody suffers from poor cultural | offerings. | hamburglar wrote: | > [the point was] that long tail content in aggregate could | be financially viable for distributors and other sellers-- | which seems at least somewhat true. | | Bandcamp has always been pretty transparent about their | sales numbers and they are at $200 million annually now. | They are about as "long tail" as it gets. | ghaff wrote: | Yes, Bandcamp is a pretty good example of a fairly pure | long tail aggregator. They're a private company but they | seem to be _modestly_ profitable. Which I guess can be | glass half full or half empty depending on your | perspective. i.e. you can make money for yourself and for | at least some long tail artists, but it 's not | blockbuster returns. | hamburglar wrote: | I think I'm really done with the idea of success being a | unicorn company. Bandcamp profitably supports something | like 100 employees and makes thousands of indie musicians | a significant amount of money. That feels like a smashing | success to me. I don't need a private island. | JKCalhoun wrote: | I for one love it. | | Forums for sci-model builders -- where kit-makers can sell | you a resin kit made in their garage of Luke Skywalker's | "T-167 Sky Hopper" (or whatever). | | Electronic kits you would not have found in Radio Shack: | Kim-1 replicas, Apple-I replicas, a SCSI emulator for vintage | computers, etc. | | Fan films that you would have been lucky to catch at a sci-fi | convention are now a click away on YouTube. | | And never mind how many of these garage kits, fan films, etc, | would have even been produced if there were not a niche forum | where these could be sold/displayed. | throwk8s wrote: | I don't think that necessarily contradicts his point. | | It may be the case that the long tail/niche | market/counterculture market is also winner-take-all [1], so | that non-mainstream content is much more available, yet almost | no one actually producing such content can really make a living | at it. | | [1] Per the article, in the context of "solving a Long Tail | problem": "And when I looked at products instead, I found the | same distribution: 80% of sales came from 20% of the products." | cs137 wrote: | _I regularly watch economically prosperous content on youtube | that would have had zero chance of distribution 10 years ago._ | | The game is different and it's too early to tell if things are | better now than before. We're seeing a lot of no-talent rich | kids ("influencers") as they take over the commons. Facebook | used to be a way that anyone, in theory, could gain social | influence. Now, it seems to ratify one's lack of influence; if | people (e.g., employers, literary agents) look you up on | Twitter and see less than 5,000 followers, they assume they can | get away with shit. | | This being said, I think we are past the nadir. We're going | from an age in which we had incompetent curators to one in | which we don't know who the curators are. As they say about | traditional vs. self-publishing, the problem for self- | publishing is that there are no gatekeepers, and the problem | with traditional publishing is that it has lousy gatekeepers | (lousy because they care more about short-term marketability | than literary merit). How this is all going to shake out is | anybody's guess. | | What concerns me is the amount of power tech companies now | have. It's great that a talented nobody can become a Youtube | star, at least now... but what happens if Youtube decides to | change its algorithm to punish leftist content? How do we | prevent spurious copyright strikes? How do people who are de- | platformed for illegitimate reasons (this literally happened to | me) seek justice? How do we make sure we're not just building | another reputation market that rich people will corner? That's | what the tech companies want, after all, for the sole reason | that it's most profitable. | uwuemu wrote: | Just look at platforms like Patreon, Subscribestar, Twitch, | Onlyfans etc. (these days also Youtube with members and | superchats). Hell, ironically enough (given the OP), even | substack. These are the places where having just 500-1000 | supporters can set you up for a VERY comfortable living, and | mostly with no need for advertisement driven business (if you | don't want to). That's where the long tail is and it's | healthier than ever before. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Long tails have been around for a long time. | | If you worked out how to crack the distributor game, you | could make a VERY comfortable living back in the 90s | producing mediocre dance music under many different names. | | You could make a VERY comfortable living as a writer in 80s | and 90s writing for niche literary or special interest | magazines. Or producing mid-market fiction. Especially | romantic novels. | | Until around 2000, you could make a VERY comfortable living | as a competent but not outstanding orchestral sessions | musician, as long as you lived in one of the bigger music | cities (London, LA, NY, Tokyo, Berlin.) Until around 2010, | likewise for pop session musicians (add Nashville and a few | others.) | | Most of those opportunities have disappeared. | | The Long Tail hasn't added anything. It has shuffled around | the opportunities. So now you can make a VERY comfortable | living as a niche YouTube star, as long as you're the right | kind of extrovert and - ideally - at least a little good | looking. | | And so on for all the other current market slots. | | They're not really new at all - just updated variations on | the old "self-employed creative" roles which happen to favour | a different set of skills. | mypalmike wrote: | Thank you. This validates my decision not to become a | competent violist. When I see orchestras play, I sometimes | wonder if I could have made a career of it. | abetusk wrote: | The point isn't that the long tail hadn't existed before, | it's that more people have access to it through new | technology. In other words, it's the difference of | approximating a probability distribution with 1 billion | points instead of 1 million. | | Before the internet, long tail effects were present with | the 1M that could get past the gauntlet of labels and | distribution conglomerates. After the internet, musicians | had better avenues to get money more directly from fans and | fans had better tools for discovery. | | You characterize it as being a zero-sum game but I don't | believe this is right. I think it's easier now than ever to | generate a (small, potentially liveable) income stream from | 'mediocre dance music', niche writer, etc. | | There are more full-time musicians and musicians earning a | living than there were 20 years ago [0] [1]. This is | directly due to the internet being the distribution | channel. | | I would imagine other fields have been effected similarly | though I haven't seen a broad study. | | [0] https://www.techdirt.com/2013/05/30/massive-growth- | independe... | | [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/raine-group- | indepe... | benreesman wrote: | I had to explain to someone younger than me why my | bookshelf has a bunch of signed first editions of like Jay | McInerny and Brett Easton Ellis and Tama Janawitz. It's not | because it's landmark writing (I have a soft spot for it | but I'm honest enough to admit that's just quirk, not | literary analysis). | | But I can read those things on the Kidle app mostly. I own | the books, which were not expensive in money but we're in | effort, because they remind me that in living memory you | could be a rockstar celebrity from _writing books_. I'm not | making a moral judgement, maybe I'm just dating myself, but | that's just important to me. | rob74 wrote: | Also, niche acts on Spotify, Bandcamp etc. - they can now | theoretically reach much larger audiences. Of course, the | downside is that there are also a lot of other acts to | compete with, so the odds of "breaking out" of the long tail | are not really good. And I'm not sure how much artists with | 10 to 30 000 "monthly listeners" earn on Spotify. Probably | not enough to make a living... | JKCalhoun wrote: | Breaking out of the long tail _never_ had good odds. | | I suspect the investment though for indie bands now is a | lot cheaper (cheaper than say filling up the van at every | college-town stop). | AlexandrB wrote: | What good is investment if there is no revenue? The best | way for indie bands to make money is still touring and | merch. So unless they're one of the lucky breakout acts, | they _still_ have to invest in filling up the van. And | even relatively successful indie albums make little money | in royalties from streaming. | chiefalchemist wrote: | Yes. But that model applies to every one. That is, the | lower bar leads to more noise (read: crap bands) and morw | competition). | | Easy means, less effort. Less effort means less | creativity. | | It's a race to the bottom. | JKCalhoun wrote: | There's still a hurdle -- artists still have to be | prolific and have the drive/energy to record/edit/upload. | That alone filters out most of the noise. | | Lacking a long tail, culture becomes a race to the banal. | chiefalchemist wrote: | Prolific has nothing to do with quality. | | I sold music (i.e. dance / electronic music) from 1990 | (pre-internet) and into the mid+ 00s. I saw what easier | production and easier distribution did for quality. | | Ask any DJ who has lived long enough, and no one will | tell you there's less noise. | JKCalhoun wrote: | I don't doubt there's more noise (I wasn't arguing there | wasn't -- rather that there is still a hurdle). | | The alternative is worse though. | chiefalchemist wrote: | If there's an excess of noise, then there is no effective | hurdle. A bit of natural unavoidable friction (e.g., | uploading song) is not a hurdle. | | We do have more choice. Unfortunately, there's been a | disproportunate increase in friction / noise. | | A net loss, which supports the article's theory. | ghaff wrote: | So, if every 30,000 monthly listener on Spotify listens to | 10 songs on average they'll earn about $1300 per month by | my calculation. Of course, playing weekend gigs at your | local bar or college party didn't earn you a living either. | galaxyLogic wrote: | In NYC a typical bar-band gets one free bear per player, | sometimes not even that. | achenet wrote: | What type of bear? Polar bear? Grizzly bear? | | just kidding, I'm almost sure you meant beer ;) | newsclues wrote: | Are those content creators being fairly rewarded? | egypturnash wrote: | I have about 100 supporters on Patreon and this makes enough | money for me to cover my bills, and spend my days swanning | aimlessly about my town's cafes and parks, drawing whatever I | want to draw. About 15% of what I make goes to Patron and | payment processing. | yashasolutions wrote: | Define fair. Also, not sure fair is even the goal for many of | them. If you want to maximize your revenue, you are nearly | always better off on your own platform. So these platform | take a cut and it is left to the user to make a choice if | it's worth it. | ghaff wrote: | What's "fair"? More people are getting their work seen than | ever. But there's no law that if you create something people | are going to pay you for it. That's never been the case. | Icathian wrote: | It's hard to get real numbers from across the spectrum but | the short answer is that the popular ones are doing very | well. I posted a link on HN to a Magic the Gathering YouTube | streamer doing an incredibly transparent breakdown of his | income. If you want hard numbers (albeit with a sample size | of 1) that'd be a good place to start. | arka2147483647 wrote: | Many of the successful YouTube creators seem to me to be of the | type "somebody in a room, with a camera, Play Button on an Ikea | shelf". Looks like moderate middle-class trappings. | | If that is successful, what does the long tail look like? | | I mean, there are a lot of people making videos. But I don't | really believe many of those get their full income from it. | orthoxerox wrote: | The long tail looks exactly like that, but without a Play | Button. Luck aside, rewards are usually exponential. Is a | breakout vlogger with a million subscribers a hundred times | better than one with ten thousand? Is he even ten times | better? | notatoad wrote: | part of that is just the youtuber aesthetic. MKBHD basically | looks like that, but i don't think there's any doubt that | he's making good money off youtube | [deleted] | mcv wrote: | The observation that big business will be most interested in | serving big numbers of mainstream customers with cookie-cutter | blockbusters sounds trivially obvious to me. | | The issue with the Web isn't that it makes big business more | interested in serving niche interests, it's that it's somewhat | easier for niche publishers to compete with them. And sometimes | even on big business infrastructure! Writers self-publishing | their e-books on Amazon, bands and other small content-creators | reaching fans on YouTube. There's lots of that, and it's great, | but it's never going to sell as big as the mainstream, because if | it did, it would be the mainstream. Didn't Justin Bieber start | out on YouTube too? | tgflynn wrote: | Yes, there seems to be a bait and switch going on in this | article. You can't conclude that the "long tail" is dying | because big business isn't investing in it. The real questions | we should be asking are is the content being produced and are | those who produce it able to make a living. | | It's harder to be sure about the second question but from what | I've seen the answer to the first question is definitely yes. | | I have yet to find an interest so obscure that you can't find | multiple high quality YouTube channels covering it. Want to | listen to a recitation of the Iliad in Homeric Greek ? It's | there. Want to watch a 2 hour video on configuring emacs ? | You're covered. | hedora wrote: | I started skimming halfway through, but I didn't see any evidence | in the article to support its central claim. | | What percentage of revenue / consumption is going to long tail | content now, and how has that changed over time? | | I watch lots of recent movies on mainstream streaming services, | and haven't heard of any of the sequels in the article's top ten | list. | | Heck, I even mostly watch science fiction / action stuff, and | passed on most of the things those movies are sequels of. I can't | be alone in my viewing habits. | bryanlarsen wrote: | For a compare and contrast, look at Adam Savage's career. | Mythbusters was the rare example of a niche product that managed | to break through to mainstream success. | | It was the exception that proves the rule. It stood out because | there was very little like it. | | These days you can't find anything like Mythbusters on mainstream | TV. But you can find thousands of similar channels on YouTube. As | consumers we're much better off today. | | And as a producer, Savage's reach is far smaller than it was | 10-20 years ago. Yet I bet he's making more money off Patreon and | his YouTube channel than he did off Mythbusters. | | The author is complaining that theatres don't play tail content | any more. That's because tail content is so successful they have | their own channels now, they don't depend on mainstream | distribution. Nobody looking for niche content is looking in | theatres, they're looking on YouTube or TikTok. | ghaff wrote: | And of course the competition from those platforms--as well as | other streaming platforms--means that there are a lot fewer art | house or back catalog theatres than there used to be. So what | "long tail" theatres did exist, mostly in large cities, mostly | don't any longer which means theatres are more about | blockbuster content than ever. | bjourne wrote: | The long tail hypothesis went as follows. Plot a curve with | products in descending order of popularity on the x axis and | units sold (or other equivalent metrics such as downloads or | views) on the y axis. The curve will approximate an exponentially | decreasing function. As the cost of keeping inventory decreases, | the curve will become more shallow. I.e the fraction of the | curve's total area under the first x% will decrease. This | hypothesis was utterly wrong and for most products the curve has | become peakier (sharper) not shallower. | | I think people who comment haven't read Anderson's book - in | hindsight it is laughable how wrong he was. | woopwoop wrote: | I've never heard of this person, but I read most of their | article. Kind of defeats their point, no? | ggambetta wrote: | Hasn't this become true to some extent, though? We have a | nontrivial amount of people making a living off their YouTube | channel, or their Twitch streams, or their Patreon patrons, or | Kickstarter, that didn't have access to a global audience 10 or | 20 years ago. | | Even I had moderate success developing videogames in the early | 2000s that were definitely part of the long tail; my CG book and | my multiplayer articles have found a global if very niche | audience. Some of my other projects, like the novel or the movie, | haven't, but it's more about their quality and my marketing | skills than about not having access. | pnf wrote: | Mainstream culture is going to be dominated by consolidated media | companies until we go back to decentralized, disconnected | medieval village life. (Whether that's desirable or whether the | path there is survivable is another question.) But when have | there been more subcultures in the past decades than now? It's | just that they are so niche as to be boring to almost everyone | not into them. But for the chosen few, there will often be a | commercial element to their interest that is sustaining the | "creators". Maybe not to the middle class lifestyle as the author | laments. But what does that even mean anymore? Still, there are | many people living independently, supported by their small | audiences. That is new. | kromem wrote: | There's so much wrong with this piece it's mind blowing. | | I'm not sure where the author got the impression that the long | tail promised sustainable income for long tail content creators - | that was always antithetical to the concept. | | But if we look at YouTube's 6.9 billion in revenue for Q1 '22 vs | Netflix's 7.9 billion in Q1 '22 it sure looks like the long tail | still has a seat at the table. | | And it's about to explode. | | The problem with the long tail was the expense of content | generation. | | We live in an age where long tail artists get paid to create VERY | specific rule 34 erotic art for extremely unique fetishes - but | it necessitates the desire for that art to exist to be greater | than the threshold of the cost to create it. | | But the eventual erotic allowed version of DALL-E 2 is going to | make SO MUCH bizarre porn at the cost of cents. | | The long tail is precisely the part of the curve that's going to | be most impacted by the coming tsunami of change AI is going to | bring. | | Why hire a service that has a C-list celebrity leave a happy | birthday greeting for a loved one at $500 (current long tail) | when you can have voice synthesis create an identical sounding | result from an AAA celebrity (or extremely niche favorite | celebrity of your loved one) for $0.005? | | The long tail hasn't failed. It's still doing pretty fantastic. | | This article not only falsely predicts the death of the long | tail, it fails to recognize that the long tail is about to hit | puberty. | quadhome wrote: | What if the Long Tail was effectively creative venture capitalism | in the era of cheap money? | | Does that mean media and culture re-centralise in a recession? | | The author makes predicts that Spotify will follow other | aggregators and reduce its catalogue to blockbusters. We'll see! | fullshark wrote: | The long tail has never been stronger, the paradox is the head | has also never been stronger in terms of attracting advertising | dollars + cultural head space BECAUSE the long tail has never | been stronger. Basically NFL/NBA and Disney properties are the | only things with massive cultural foot prints anymore, and are | more valuable for that reason (see: the movie investment portion | of the piece). So many conversations now with my friends about | pop culture and we'll mention TV shows, music, games, books, or | movies we're consuming, and none of us have even heard of what | we're talking about. That wasn't the case 20 years ago and | cultural fragmentation will just continue. | | The author is basically lamenting how long tail properties used | to have larger cultural footprints in part because there were so | few of them. So the long tail has never been larger or more | important, but each individual member of the long tail is growing | weaker as the tail is growing in size. | lucas_membrane wrote: | Disney -- They acquired the rights to Rocky and Bullwinkle (and | Betty Boop, too, IIRC) simply to eliminate competition from the | long tail. | mumblemumble wrote: | If we agree that aggregators of the long tail are getting | stronger, then I'd argue that the long tail is also getting | stronger. But the medium tail might be having a hard time of | it. | | Take the trajectory of my video consumption. I've never been | super big on mainstream culture, for whatever reason. So, with | some notable examples, I tend not to consume much in the way of | blockbuster movies or prime time TV. 25 years ago, what that | meant was that I was watching David Lynch movies and the like. | Nowadays, no studios are funding that kind of work. | | But I've also moved further out on the tail. I'm not even sure | the tail went this far back when the term "long tail" was | coined. My favorite film I've seen so far this year was a | documentary that I don't think would ever have made it on to | the distribution networks that existed in the late 1990s. | (Maybe a film festival I couldn't have afforded to attend.) But | I was able to find it on Apple TV. And we can go even further | out if we look at YouTube and Vimeo. I don't know that | something like Motorsport Gigantoraptor or Super Sus would have | even been possible a quarter century ago. | mch82 wrote: | Edit: I've double checked & I was thinking of "Free" (2009), not | "Long Tail" (2006). Thank you Ghaff for pointing that out. | | "Free" is based on the idea of selling by products or unedited | work at lower prices and moving up market. My comment below gives | an example of "Free" applied to video games. | mch82 wrote: | Here's what a Long Tail business model looks like in video | games: | | Start working on an indie game. Along the way, record Unity | tutorials to begin building an audience. Post some texture | packs to the Unity asset store, then some level packs, then | some rigged and animated characters. Share some footage of test | gameplay. Start getting audience feedback and fans. Release | plot notes on the web. Maybe turn some of that into books | (Infinity Blade) on Kindle & iPad, where the cost to publish is | zero. Release the full base game as an open beta, but charge | for it. Release the final base game at a low price or as free | to play. Charge for DLC (Civ VI, StarLink) or skins (Rocket | League, Fortnite), or a single player campaign (Halo). Twitch | stream your gameplay. Once your graphics are awesome, make a | movie (Final Fantasy). | pixelbro wrote: | Why are none of the examples you mention remotely close to | being indie games? Those are clearly _not_ what a Long Tail | business model looks like in video games. That Infinity Blade | novella was written by _Brandon Sanderson_. | mch82 wrote: | My goal was to illustrate the arc, from indie bootstrap to | AAA success. I don't recall Chair as a AAA studio in 2010. | The development of PUBG, which began as a mod of another | game, might be a better example. | | I did messed up here by mixing concepts from "Free" in with | the concepts from "Long Tail". I went back and re-read the | Long Tail article from WIRED and edited my patent comment | above to correct that error. | ghaff wrote: | As Anderson also wrote about in _Free_ there are also a lot of | "free" business models where you give away the blog posts, | ebook, etc. as essentially promotion for something else--like | your time as a consultant or even just your status as an | employee. | mch82 wrote: | Yes, and you've made me wonder if I may be mixing up bit of | Free and Long Tail. I've read and recommend both. | cudgy wrote: | Observation. Long-tail boutique shops curate interesting content | for their niche customers. Said customers buy this content from | large aggregators like Amazon due to lower price or delivery | advantages. Essentially the long-tail boutique shops serve as | "free" advertising for the aggregators. | | This was the same in the early e-commerce wave of brick/mortar | specialty stores being eviscerated by websites due to customers | going to brick and mortar to physically touch and view | merchandise only then buy it online for a cheaper price. For | example, Fry's Electronics, Best Buy, Sears, etc suffered from | this trend. | | Hence, the new trend toward "influencers" on social media who | demonstrate products and provide referral links to the big | aggregators instead of selling the product themselves. Some of | these influencers are able to brand their own products to make | even more money, but they are in the minority. | kqr wrote: | There's another side of the long tail (power law) coin: the head | becomes much more popular. Both extremes become more extreme, at | the expense of the shoulders. | | This seems like what we see: places like YouTube allows small | producers to be viable with small audiences -- on the other side, | things like Netflix pushes generic content that you can pretty | much assume everyone with Netflix has seen. | seydor wrote: | The long tail is always temporary - a cambrian explosion followed | by a bottleneck that picks the winners, and the next cycle begins | bambax wrote: | The article conflates artists/content creators, publishers, and | aggregators and use one or the other when it suits its argument. | | There are YT videos on any subject available, and then some. Many | people post videos that have very few views, while at the same | time, some creators addressing super niche content become wildly | successful. To pick one example among millions, The Lockpicking | Lawyer has become a meme ("nothing on one, click on two..."), and | who would argue picking locks isn't part of the Long Tail?? | | It's possible to self publish and print on demand books that | would never have existed before. Not in 1990, not in 2000, and | not even in 2010. (I published one last year, sold around 1000 | copies: that's the Long Tail right there!) | | Film producers are looking at hits? Of course they are. But you | can find shorts on Vimeo that are innovative and original, and | before our current age there was no way to discover such films | except go to festivals, and watch only the films that had been | selected by the organizers. | | Etc. To argue that the Long Tail didn't pan out is simply | ridiculous. | photochemsyn wrote: | Large for-profit corporations are never going to be that | interested in providing anything other than a relatively small | range of products and services, because that's the most | profitable approach. If everyone drinks Coke, you can build a | Coke factory, develop economies of scale, and make large profits. | If everyone has their own unique beverage with no preservatives | that has a short shelf life, this doesn't scale, as now you need | hundreds of separate production lines for each unique beverage. | | This also creates a desire for a homogenous population that can | be easily marketed to, and ideally a rather dumbed-down | population that can be herded like cats by AI recommendation | algorithms into the appropriate boxes where their buying habits | can be essentially dictated to them (along with their political | opinions, ahem). Meet the brainwashed zombies of mass | consumption... | | You really have to deliberately choose to not participate in | this, but if you turn your back on it, you can still find lots of | interesting niches outside of the Amazon-Netflix-Spotify zone - | but nobody's getting rich out on the fringes, because margins are | thin and there's no economies of scale to exploit. | hintymad wrote: | > Alternative voices would be nurtured and flourish. Music would | get cooler and more surprising. Books would become more diverse | and interesting. Indie films would reach larger audiences. Etc. | etc. etc. | | Long tail in movies/tv shows certainly does not apply to me. I | find my taste is amazing aligned with IMDB's cores, especially in | actions and thrillers. If a show has a score higher than 8.0, 99% | of time I'll love it. Bourne series is my favorite spy movies. I | can't stop watching Better Call Saul. The list can go on. On the | other hand, if a show's IMDB's slow is lower than 6.0, I can be | almost certain that I won't like it. There are a few exceptions, | such as Black Panther (its setup is just ridiculous, even among | all the supe movies), but in general long tail in entertainment | never worked on me or anyone I know. | toss1 wrote: | My first thought on reading the title was: "It (the long tail ) | is obscured/starved by search engines optimizing for the | generic,not the peculiar thing I/we are looking for " | | And there it is: >>Web platforms aren't really focused on serving | users--what they really want to do is control users. This almost | always requires them to squeeze out niche and alternative views, | and force as many customers as possible to follow the herd. | | >>That's a useful comparison. Web platforms are herders. And, if | you follow the analogy, that makes us all sheep. | | It definitely seems harder to find specific information than it | was a few years ago. How can we get search engines to surface the | really obscure information gems? | | I also wonder -if only ~20% of the people are responsible for | almost all of the sales ,what are the other 80% doing ? | | Seems there should be some fat sales tails to be found in that | area. It's almost as if the relentless MBA approach of seeking | 'blockbusters' and cutting 'losers' just reaches a local maxima, | which although very big, is actually suboptimal. | | What am I missing here? | bryanlarsen wrote: | The author makes two points: 1. The vast majority of the money is | made by blockbusters. 2. Producers outside of blockbusters aren't | making a living. | | 1 is true but misleading. Anecdotally, I believe 2 is wrong. | | "The Long Tail" doesn't disagree with point #1. The fat head is | where the most of the money is. That's not new or controversial. | IIRC, the Long Tail says that it's now possible to exploit the | long tail. It's still the tail, though. You're not going to be | making rock star money, but at least you can now put food on your | table. I know several musicians who pawned their instruments in | the 90s to be able to eat. The musicians I know in the 2020s | certainly aren't thriving, but they're not pawning instruments. | | And #2 is just plain wrong. Tons of niche content creators have | turned professional in the last few years. They're not making | rock star cash, but they've quit their day job. | | The ones who are coming closest to rock star cash are the video | producers. This used to be a brutal field. You'd need to scrape | together 7 figures to make a movie, do the indie field circuit, | et cetera. Now all you need is an iPhone and a YouTube or TikTok | account, perhaps combined with Patreon. Netflix isn't where you | find the long tail, YouTube and TikTok are. And now there are | YouTube channels much more professional than your local TV | stations. | | For music, 99% of musicians used to make their living teaching, | and they still do. The money they get sporadically playing in | small venues is just bonus money. But they all have Patreon's now | too. It's not enough to let them stop teaching, but the regular | income makes a huge difference compared to the very irregular | income from gigs. | | AFAICT writers have always had a long tail. If you could sell a | few thousand books, you could find a publisher. You wouldn't get | any promotion or shelf space at that volume nor enough money to | quit your day job, but... | | These days there are tons of writers who have quit their day job | and subsist on web fiction + Patreon + Kindle Unlimited. | ghaff wrote: | It's an interesting question what the long tail looks like | financially for individual creators both in absolute numbers | and on a percentage basis relative to 25 years ago. | | I suspect in absolute numbers there is more money going to long | tail creators just because there is so much more opportunity to | reach a non-geographically-bound audience. | | On the other hand, the barriers to entry have essentially | collapsed in many cases which has, among other things, led to a | veritable flood of content--and many of the often fairly casual | creators don't even have a particular interest in, at least | directly, monetizing. If you're a long tail would be | professional, you have more channels to a potentially paying | audience today that doesn't necessarily involve getting picked | by a gatekeeper. But you're also now competing with a huge | number of enthusiastic amateurs, who don't care about the | money, who would never have bothered if they had to get through | a gatekeeper. | sumy23 wrote: | Does anyone else hate the long tail? Most of the content I | consume comes from the long tail. The content itself is | interesting and great. I love it. However, consuming long tail | content feels like another step along the path towards social | isolation. Like I can never talk about or share the things I | enjoy with others because the chance of them also having enjoyed | these things is near-0. And of course, you can recommend your | long tail content to others, but everyone is always recommending | long tail content to each other. It's a bit much to keep up with. | I feel somewhat envious of the days when, for instance, everyone | in the country listened to The White Album or Dark Side of the | Moon and could enjoy it together. | radley wrote: | 64 year old man focused on 80-year old music can't see the rest | of the tail. There's more music out there than just Jazz. | raverbashing wrote: | The long tails are there, but it requires effort. | | If you consume content passively (major news, fb front page, | reddit etc) you only get the crap generalized (and now | polarizing) opinions. But the more niche stuff is not on the | frontpage. It's not all cheap takes and funny memes. | | It's like food. You can get the fast food crap for cheap or | either you pay with money or time for something better | ouid wrote: | My crotchety take on this is that basically anything worth | consuming has remained that way excelusively by not being | profitable. | jacquesm wrote: | Thought experiment: take all of the queries that Google deals | with during a year. Then run all of the results together to get a | set of webpages represented by the first five pages of results | (does anybody still try to go beyond page 5?). | | The remove the rest of the web. Who will notice? | njharman wrote: | Almost everyone. But very few of them will notice the same | things are missing. | | That is the very definition of the long tail. | njharman wrote: | Maybe I missed the memo. I never thought of the "long-tail" about | making money. I always considered freedom from curation, freedom | of access, freedom from the mainstream, freedom from just what | made some distributor the most money. | | I never thought (or heard) that it would "give a boost" to the | fringe or cause Indie films to reach wider audiences. | | Just the opposite. It would (and did) make the obscure, zero | commercial value, thing that on 3 to sub a million people *in the | entire world* care about; distributable and "consumable". | | It wasn't ever gonna make the masses suddenly like embrace | unique, interesting, bespoke content that by definition only a | small percentage of people enjoy. | | It gave everyone access to their audience, no matter how | uncommercial or unconnected to people/orgs/places that previously | controlled distribution and access. | | In all of that. There is a ton that is moderately commercial, | enough to support a creator or small team (see every monetized | YT, Twitch, Indieagogo, Kickstarter, Lulu book, etc). For sure, | not enough to support a multi-tiered industry of distributors, | licensors, and middlemen. The gatekeepers lost their gate locks. | | The author doesn't see all of this because it so, so, so far | under radar. [And they seem very focused on the commercial/profit | side of things. As in if it doesn't make large commercial impact | it's inconsequential. Which is weird to ignore the long end of | the long tail.] | | If the author is lamenting the industry failed to capitalize on | the long tail. Fuck that and them. I shed zero tears. | Cupertino95014 wrote: | There IS a guy who claims to make $5,000 a month writing about | _really_ boring topics. He picks the most boring thing you can | think of, writes the definitive research about it, and _voila_. | There are enough people who find his writing interesting, and the | topic unusual enough, that the Long Tail is working for him. | | But Ted is right: Long Tail producers have always had a tough | time, and whatever opportunities there are now are even harder to | find. Old ones, like being the Swing Dance King of Pittsburgh (I | made that up, so don't come at me) don't pay like they used to. | Izkata wrote: | > I'm not saying that all those 'underground fringes' that | Anderson celebrated have disappeared--I'm merely claiming that | they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in modern | history. To operate on the fringe is almost akin to wearing an | invisibility cloak from one of those Harry Potter stories. | | That's kind of a funny mention: Harry Potter was one of those | niche long shots that turned into an unexpected hit. It just | happened in the 90s. | | As I understand it, the "long tail" existed as a gambit to find | the big hits like Harry Potter. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-26 23:00 UTC)