The Long Tail

Chris Anderson, Random House, 2006, 238 pages, £17.99.

For the last decade any ambitious young executive seeking to climb the greasy pole has had to learn a whole new language. No, not Mandarin – but digital. If you cannot keep your head while all around you are spouting about ‘monetising eyeballs’ or ‘leveraging our bandwidth’ or ‘Web 2.0’, you might as well pack up and go home. Right now the essential phrase in the digital lexicon is ‘the long tail’. Anyone who doesn’t want to look blank when the chief executive asks how the business is going to adapt to ‘long tail economics’ will need to read Chris Anderson’s book.

Back during the first dot com boom – or Web 1.0 as I suppose we must call it – the digital gurus were telling us that the internet changed everything and in the words of Intel’s founder Andy Grove "only the paranoid would survive". Such would be the impact of the frictionless distribution and transaction system provided by the net, that entire industries would fade and die. Tumbleweed would blow through the shopping malls as everyone resorted to buying online, estate agents would have to sell their fleets of branded Minis on ebay as house buyers and sellers got together to cut out the middleman.

As anyone who bought dot com shares will know to their cost, it didn’t quite work out that way. The future was a bit late arriving – but Chris Anderson’s theory is that it’s here now. With broadband in almost half of all UK households – and penetration as high as 80% in South Korea – he may be right in thinking we are now ready to use the internet to transform the way we run our businesses and our lives.

The central idea behind The Long Tail is that digital distribution means retailers of everything from music to video to advertising no longer need concentrate on their biggest sellers and their best customers to thrive. Indeed, they can make more profit by selling thousands, even millions, of relatively obscure products to a far wider and more esoteric customer base.

The idea is conveyed in a simple graph which is scattered, by my reckoning, in at least 15 different forms through the pages of this book. It depicts a curve which starts high on the vertical axis before plunging rapidly and then coasting along the horizontal axis into the distance.

That steeply falling section of the curve is where traditional bricks and mortar retailers make their money, offering a limited range of products, and dependent on just a few bestsellers for most of their profits. The rest of the line – the long tail – is where online retailers like Amazon or Itunes operate, offering millions of books or songs, and making more from all those aggregated ‘misses’ than from the few ‘hits’ at the beginning of the curve. The physical limits of a Walmart or an HMV store mean they have to ‘rent’ the space on their shelves to products which will sell quickly and in great numbers, while the online business has almost unlimited space – all the more so if it is selling ‘weightless’ goods like music or software.

This idea was first expounded by Anderson in an article in Wired magazine, and to flesh it out he takes his theory and applies it to all man-ner of areas, both commercial and cultural. The Long Tail, he tells us, will end the tyranny of the best-seller lists, will provide consumers with unlimited choice, and will give the little guy – from the blogger to the Youtube video artist – a chance to reach an audience and make a living.

Some of this feels a little tenuous – is it really true that there’s a Long Tail of beer with microbrewers suddenly reaching previously inaccessible drinkers? Or that a ‘hit’ culture is quickly going to be replaced by a ‘niche’ culture where we get easier access to the products we want rather than those most popular with the crowds?

The Long Tail is an engaging read and has been riding high on the business bestseller lists. The publishers and the online book retailers must be grateful for this hit, but if Mr Anderson is right they shouldn’t be. Instead they should be thanking all those thousands of ‘niche’ authors with tiny sales who are contributing more to their profits.

Rory Cellan-Jones

BBC Technology Correspondent and author of ‘Dot Bomb’, Aurum Press, 2001