Chasing tail

New-business geeks are hailing Wired editor Chris Anderson for his sexy "long tail" theory of cultural consumption. But is his book for us or CEOs?

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Books, Silicon Valley, Amazon.com, Wired, Reviews, Book reviews, Farhad Manjoo

Aug. 9, 2006 | Almost two years ago, Chris Anderson, who is the editor of Wired magazine, published an article describing the intriguing features of markets -- such as that for books, CDs and DVDs -- in which scarcity is giving way to abundance. Anderson argued that unlimited selection -- the 3.7 million books on Amazon.com versus the 100,000 available at your local Borders, to take one example -- has occasioned a shift in the culture away from big hits and toward smaller niches. Anyone who has ever purchased media online knows this intuitively; which Netflix user hasn't burst into frenzied delight at the possibility of renting every Preston Sturges feature instead of just the latest thing Will Ferrell's starring in? But Anderson was the first to put a picture and a name to the phenomenon of unlimited selection, and he was greeted as a prophet of the new.

To understand what captivated people, you've got to look at the picture Anderson coined, a simple graph that orders the popularity of each title in a catalog from high to low -- say, the popularity of every book in print, or of every DVD for sale. The diagram looks roughly like a hockey stick turned on its side. The blade of the stick represents hits, the few titles that, in any given time period, huge numbers of us are buying. Anderson calls this part of the graph the "head"; it's in the head that you'll find Will Ferrell. The rest of the graph -- the shaft of the hockey stick -- is the object of Anderson's obsession. He calls it the "tail."

Anderson's singular insight was that, in a digital world, the tail goes on and on and on. Your local Blockbuster can't waste valuable shelf space on something as unpopular as Preston Sturges' oeuvre; since the shop maxes out at about 3,000 DVDs, there isn't much room to stock items way down in the tail. But storing a DVD in a mail-order warehouse is much cheaper than storing it in a Blockbuster store, and storing a digital movie on an Internet server is essentially free. That's the magic of online distribution: Netflix can carry all the Preston Sturges DVDs, and iTunes can keep the obscurest of covers, and YouTube can put up every inane or insane video ever captured by man. And according to Anderson, online merchants like Netflix, iTunes and others do a substantial business selling niche items. It turns out that there's always someone, somewhere interested in watching old episodes of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" or whatever else you think would never ring your bell. Unlimited selection is allowing us to indulge our deepest media desires, and it's big business, too.

Anderson could have called his idea the "Incredibly Tall Hockey Stick," but he's a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan, and thus he understands that if you want to get business people to home in on your idea, nomenclature is crucial. So he called it "The Long Tail," and, like the "The Tipping Point," the appellation is now nearly inescapable. At certain insufferable Silicon Valley cocktail parties you'll find folks luxuriating over the phrase, gabbing about how to angle in on the true prize in Anderson's insight, which he helpfully outlines in his book's subtitle: "Why the future of business is selling less of more."

Anderson and his fans have been ruminating over the "long tail" for a while now, and on Anderson's blog and elsewhere, they've said a lot -- about the concept. During that time, Anderson also enlisted students and professors at some of the country's most prominent business schools to help him research the matter. But for all this work, "The Long Tail" feels surprisingly free of new insight; it doesn't say a great deal more than what Anderson offered in his breakthrough Wired article.

Certainly the book clarifies, bolsters, improves. The Wired piece carried the light step of theory, while the book has ambitions to a towering proof, with some tacked-on corporate how-to bits. The problem is, it's a business book. Though he spends some time, here and there, discussing you and me, Anderson is mainly addressing those cheery SiliValley types looking to cash in on tail. As far as I can make out from his introduction, what got Anderson most juiced up about the long tail in the first place were the many conversations he had with new-media CEOs about their businesses. I've never met the man, but I'd hazard he's the sort of fellow who actually has fun talking to CEOs.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Yet "The Long Tail" is about much, much more than how tech execs should design their online stores. The Web, iPods, iTunes, TiVo, Netflix, Amazon.com, e-mail, RSS, satellite TV, digital photography, cable news, talk radio, books-on-demand, the 500-channel universe, the information superhighway, the long tail: All these things are a really about one thing, and the thing is cultural fragmentation. The story of the long tail is the story of a dominant mass media shattering around us, and of what happens to society when we're all forced to sort through the shards -- all the information and the misinformation -- that come at us in a world saturated by media. It's true that one consequence of all this might be that more people will begin subscribe to Netflix and start renting a lot more niche DVDs. But that can't be the full story.

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