Whimsley

The Long Tail 15 - Coda

This is the final part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the Coda. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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"Coda" is the very last section of the Long Tail, and this is the very last section of my critique of the book.

The book's "Coda" is a two page piece that talks about 3D printers, which may enable all kinds of other goods to become digital - just as documents and music and photos and videos have all moved from being solid things to being digital - "materialized" where you download them.

And the lesson of 3D printing is that we'll see "the explosion of variety we've seen in our culture thanks to digital efficiencies" [226] extended to other areas of our lives.

The coda summarizes some of the things I find so frustrating about this book, and why I've spent so much time on it. It's not just that it's a bad book - although I do believe it is - but that it is a bad book about some really important changes; changes with the potential to do great good and great harm. Reading Chris Kenny's reflective commentary emphasized this for me. Anderson holds up a picture that is very attractive - greater diversity, a broadening of voices in public discussion, a chance for people without connections to have a say, and so on - and he says he's all for it. And he's all against stodgy old "institutions". So the book attracts people who are doing interesting things, and thinking along admirable lines.

But then he betrays us. Because when it comes down to it, he's on the side of multi-millionaires and billionaires, and the "institutions" he feels so rebellious about are small publishers, small bookshops, and so on. Not that he'd put it that way, but that's the effect of his arguments. He argues that we should celebrate Netflix, Amazon and a handful of others, and trust them to be the custodians of our culture because they'll deliver variety. It's a dangerous argument, predicated on the fact that these are somehow different companies - a kinder capitalism. And it's wrong, of course.

To review, here's what I see as the main flaws that run throughout the book:

Flimsy Foundations - Despite the talk of openness, the empirical core of the book is a set of numbers vouched for only by the CEO's of companies who stand to benefit from their association with radical new ideas. Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and Rhapsody let him see their figures under strict conditions. There is, in the end, little to demonstrate that some of these companies are delivering on the promise of the Long Tail. The evidence that iTunes is a "Long Tail aggregator", for example, is non-existent.

Protean Perspectives - The Long Tail is sometimes a set of rules for how to build a profitable business, sometimes an assertion about economic and technological forces, and sometimes a claim about cultural change. The book tries to shove Wikipedia, blogs, Netflix, and more into a single tent - and it doesn't hold. I've no problem with using a single name for multiple related ideas, but Anderson shifts from one meaning to another to another throughout the book, and the result is a form of misdirection as he invokes whichever is needed to make the point he wants to make. It makes criticism difficult, but in the end consistency matters, and the book lacks it. Instead of each part of the story strengthening the others, the whole edifice turns out to be built on nothing.

Failure to Follow the Money - As Bertoldt Brecht said "Amongst the highly placed it is considered low to talk about food. The fact is: they have already eaten." Of course the CEOs of new technology businesses aren't interested in talking about something as mundane as money, but we must, and Anderson doesn't. This matters for two reasons.

First, the book conflates non-commercial and commercial initiatives - Amazon's recommendation engine and Wikipedia, for example - as if they are not different. But they are. There is much talk of community on the web, but corporate-sponsored "communities", while they do have their place, are not communities in any significant sense. On the other hand, an effort like Indymedia is a real community. These are different things. I have worried that by emphasizing how different the phenomena of the web are that I'm missing the big picture - but I'm pretty confident that's not the case. The Long Tail big picture is a mirage: the closer you get to it, the less tangible it is.

Second, there is a political effect that we've seen with successful aggregators. A single iTunes, coupled with Wal-Mart, drives many independent businesses out of existence. The result is the opposite of the democratization Anderson claims to be promoting. The emergence of iTunes is a centralization of influence within the music industry, not a decentralization. Amazon is not a proletarian revolt against the tyranny of elitist bookshops, it's the driving out of many small businesses by one big business. Money is flowing through these new organizations, and it is flowing towards fewer people than ever, not more. To ignore the impact of technology on inequality is to take a political stance, and it's not a progressive one.

Selective Vision - We see this in the comparison of the "old world" to the "new world". By comparing Rhapsody music to Wal-Mart, Anderson is stacking the deck - something he does throughout the entire book. What's more, he's mistaking the dynamic that is at work in the world of business. While Anderson sees online commerce as challenging the Wal-Marts of the world, it too often complements them. If I had these posts to write over again I'd start off at the beginning by pointing out that technological forces are creating, not a Long Tail, but a technological vice. On one jaw is the big box store, stocking a few titles at cheap prices. On the other jaw is the online store, stocking everything (but not necessarily selling a whole lot of everything). This is not the way to produce a culture of variety. My prediction: as these enterprises realise how complementary they are, we'll start to see more in the way of mergers between the two worlds.

Selective vision is also at work in his perception of the new companies. While the book celebrates the open sides of their business models, he completely ignores the other side. Google, Amazon, Netflix are all secretive when they want to be. They all pursue patents with vigour in order to close down the possibility of competition. Netflix even patented its "mailing and response envelope" - this is not "radical transparency" as Anderson has taken to calling it. We the consumers are let inside the walls to play, but in  a carefully controlled playroom. And we're kept out away from the valuables.

Finally, in his enthusiasm to celebrate variety he bundles pseudo-variety (wall-of-toothpaste variety) with real variety. Is there no distinction? Of course there is, but Mr. Anderson is blind to it.

The end result of all this selection is a muddled and distorted picture. It sounds great at first reading, as Anderson runs through examples of new variety at breakneck speed, but stop a minute and you realise he's only telling one half of the story - and half the story can never give the whole picture, no matter how many examples he finds. And even then he's not telling it straight.

So what do I think? Do I think the Internet is a force for good or bad? Yes. Is it a force for increased decentralization or increased centralization? Absolutely. Is new technology a source of increased variety or increased homogeneity? No doubt about it.

The Internet and related technologies are going to have a huge effect on our society. Or rather, many huge effects. And which ones win out - the good or the bad - will be determined by people actively struggling to ensure that their vision of it prevails, not by trusting to the market to solve it for us. Part of the appeal of The Long Tail is that it talks of the "democratization of production". Innovative cultural ideas (as opposed to technical ideas) will often be found at the margins; in Jane Jacobs wonderful phrase "new ideas need old buildings", and this means they need to be done on the cheap, often subsidized through non-market routes, and nourished. While Internet technologies are one more path that cultural innovators can follow, it is a big mistake to trust commercial enterprises, be it Amazon or Netflix, to act as custodians of the public space that is variety. With his heart, I suspect, in the right place, Anderson is leading us down a dangerous road, and that's why I've spent so many hours showing what's wrong with his book.

For anyone who has made it to the end, let me finish by pointing you to a posting on the Long Tail blog, where Chris Anderson walks through the major objections to his book. Here are his "top five mistakes" with a one sentence answer from Anderson (there's more on his blog):

X was a hit! See? Hits aren't dead. - "I never said they were"
I've done an analysis of this dataset and, in percentage terms, it shows that sales are become more concentrated in the head, not less - "Hah! This is the percentage mistake."
I'm in the Long Tail and I'm not rich yet - the theory clearly doesn't work. - "The big money in the Long Tail is in aggregation"
You said that 57% of Amazon sales are Long Tail. No way. - "I know. That part .. has been revised to 25%"
You call Blockbuster and Barnes & Noble the Short Head. But what about Blockbuster.com and BN.com? They've got every bit as big an inventory as Netflix and Amazon. - "Sigh. Please understand the definitions. Short Head = inventory in the typical store of the largest bricks and mortar retailer in a market.

None of these objections is a significant part of what I've presented here, except for number 3 - and I still think it is true that a "theory" unaffected by a 100% change in a major piece of data is a theory that needs a more empirical basis and a little less enthusiasm. My objections are on other grounds entirely. I suspect they come too late to slow down the passage of "Long Tail" into the conventional wisdom of technological/business discussions but hey, you do what you can. Thanks for sticking with me.

The Long Tail 14 - Long Tail Rules

This is another part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 14 - Long Tail Rules. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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I'm getting tired, and need to get to the end of this book quickly. Then I can write a wrap-up post and be done. This final chapter (almost! there is a "coda") contains nine rules for building "a Consumer Paradise" [217], grouped under three headings. Here we go.

Lower Your Costs [217-219]
Rule 1: Move inventory to the edge - The advice is to transfer your costs to your suppliers: keep a virtual inventory. For example, Amazon Marketplace products are "held at the very edge of the network by thousands of small merchants. Cost to Amazon: zero" [218].
Rule 2: Let customers do the work - He calls this "crowdsourcing" [219]. Let customer reviews rank your books, write your content, and so on, because "collectively, customers have virtually unlimited time and energy" [219].

As I've said repeatedly, the benefits of being an aggregator are that you profit from being a natural monopoly, or at least part of a natural oligopoly. Once you can establish yourself as the place to be, vendors will want to - have little choice but to - sell their stuff on your site. Once you become the bookstore of choice, customers may add their reviews to your site. But of course there is one place where the Long Tail does not really eliminate scarcity - and that's in the supply of aggregators. When inventory is stored at the edge someone is still paying the cost of stocking it - it's just not Amazon. The Long Tail slides back and forth between talking about zero-cost (total) and zero-cost (someone-else's cost) - but never says which one is which. These are different things.

One of the changes we've seen in both sides of the technological vice (online stores + big-box stores) is that power has shifted away from manufacturers and to retail outlets. Amazon can sell goods without paying for them first. Wal-Mart is trying to introduce systems that will pay suppliers only when someone actually buys a product, so that their own shelf space becomes free (to them). It's a power shift leading to a transfer of costs, not a cutting of costs - and power matters.

Think Niche [219-221]
Rule 3 - One distribution method doesn't fit all
Rule 4 - One product doesn't fit all
Rule 5 - One price doesn't fit all.
As with much of the book, this section contains unsubstantiated claims: Rhapsody is "experimenting with track prices from $0.79 to $0.49 and finding that cutting the price in half roughly triples sales" [221]. Really? How often? All of them? We need more than this. And if the experiment was so successful, then we may wonder why the current (April 2007) Rhapsody web site says this:

Can I download tracks with Rhapsody?
Yes. You can purchase music from Rhapsody for $0.99/track, or $0.89/track with a membership.

No mention of variable pricing beyond encouraging membership.

Lose Control [221-224]
Rule 6 - Share information. Well, up to a point. One of the most pervasive ironies of the whole book is that it keeps going on about sharing information, but the very facts that are at the core of the book are hidden behind some of the thickest walls around. Actual Netflix sales distributions? Actual sales of Amazon books? Actual sales of iTunes music? None of it is here. Quite why Anderson thinks we are in a new age of openness is beyond me.
Rule 7 - Think 'And', not 'Or'
Rule 8 - Trust the market to do your job - His advice is to "throw everything out there and let the market sort it out", which is really a restatement of his Rule 2 - Let customers do the work. As I've said before, there is a big difference between what works for aggregators and what works for producing actual variety.

As just one example that I haven't mentioned before, Anderson keeps on about how referrals allow customers to move from the head to the tail of the distribution. But what happens if you start at the tail? No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart is currently (April 6) ranked 381374. The recommended books that appear on the page have the following rankings: 475137, 18675, 201, DVD #569, and 90396. That is, if you start off in the tail, the recommendation system pushes you back up towards the head of the distribution. Hence Amazon can profit by stocking all books, even if it doesn't sell much of them, because the reference system is a way of promoting other, better selling books. Now I don't know what the net effect is, but neither does Mr. Anderson.
Rule 9 - Understand the power of free is an argument for combining premium pricing and a free version of what you provide (fair enough), and for an advertising-supported revenue model. Well if one thing is becoming ubiquitous, it's advertising. Is this a move to a niche nation or a numb nation? I for one do not welcome our new advertising-sponsored overlords. Consumer paradise? I think not.

Radical Transparency? Not so much

In the middle of another fine piece from Nicholas Carr, here is Radical Transparency at work.

Asked how it uses water and electricity at its sites, Google executive Rhett Weiss said, "We're in a highly competitive industry and, frankly, one or two little pieces of information like that in the hands of our competitors can do us considerable damage. So we can't discuss it."

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The real Web 2.0.

The Long Tail 13 - Beyond Entertainment

This is another part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 13 - Beyond Entertainment. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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This penultimate chapter of the book describes "five examples of the Long Tail at work outside of media and entertainment" [201]. These examples are eBay, KitchenAid, Lego, Salesforce.com, and Google. There is another side to each of these stories.

eBay [201-203] has been hugely successful at being a marketplace for all kinds of odds and ends. Is it a Long Tail success?

The other side of the story. Let's remember that a Long Tail business is one that provides both the "head" and the "tail" of products. As Anderson writes, MP3.com was a music aggregation site, but it failed. The "problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail" [149]. Meanwhile, iTunes focused more on the head, and makes all its money from it, then apparently builds on the familiarity it provides to use smart software to help people expand their tastes. Its growth came from being a marketplace for junk; Anderson's story of its growth implicitly admits this by saying that it "now does far more than clear the nation's attics" [202]. eBay is a broker ("facilitator" [202]) that matches buyers and sellers.

eBay breaks a second rule for Long Tail businesses. Because it does not stand between the buyers and sellers (unlike Alibris and Amazon Marketplace, as we saw in Chapter 6, who ensure that they are the hub of all transactions and so collect all the information from both buyer and seller), eBay "can't offer many of the powerful filter technologies, such as recommendation engines, that drive demand so effectively at other Long Tail retailers" [203]. Putting aside yet again the question of how successful they are in reality as opposed to imagination, this "one size fits all" model he has in his head leads Anderson to suggest that eBay has a "vulnerability" [203] because of its reluctance to collect information about all the trades going on under its virtual roof.

What Anderson doesn't point out is that the eBay model gives the small vendor who is selling through eBay a bigger say in the sale. I find the eBay model more "democratic" to use one of the book's favourite words, in that it actually shares information with the vendors rather than hiding information from them as Alibris and, apparently, Amazon Marketplace do.

eBay is a huge success, an important story, but not a Long Tail one in all but the most crude sense. Yes, it sells a lot of many things, but as Anderson says when he wants to spin things in that direction, that's not the force behind the Long Tail story.

KitchenAid [203-205] is a little anecdote about how the maker of small kitchen appliances sells lots of colours ("over 50") online, compared to only a handful in the stores it supplies.

The other side. Whoop-de-do: this is nothing that can't be done in a catalogue. It's a neat thing for KitchenAid to do, but there's nothing fundamental here.

Lego [205-207] is building an online community of enthusiasts, who design and share their own constructions ("peer production" [206]) and can order the pieces to provide them. Is this the "Long Tail of plastic bricks" [207]?

The other side. Lego may like openness and they are trying some interesting things (Mindstorms for example), but there is another part to this story. Lego is as interested in fixed ownership as ever: it has been fighting the loss of its patents for years. With the effort to extend its patent on the blocks themselves failing, it is nevertheless continuing to extend their patents and prevent other companies from making inroads in the world of blocks.

Salesforce.com [207-210] is an innovative company that is succeeding in a big way. It provides "hosted software" to companies (mainly small companies) to carry out "customer relationship management" tasks (CRM). Now it wants to become a one-stop shop: an aggregator for business applications, in the same way that Amazon is an aggregator for books. Salesforce has set up a platform called AppExchange that would "allow hundreds of smaller developers, many of them in low-cost places such as India, to reach those same customers" [208].

AppExchange may succeed in its goal. It's as close as Anderson comes to a legitimate Long Tail story here. In addition, Salesforce.com has just hired Peter Coffee, an industry journalist who has long been one of the smartest technical commentators on software, to handle part of its platform.

The other side. This is a story in its early days. There are two sides to the move to aggregation and platforms: the owner of the winning platform in a particular area can win big, and Salesforce may become one of those winners unless Google or one of its other competitors beats it. It is less clear how much of its revenue will come from niche providers (no figures yet), and it is even less clear that the providers of goods for those platforms can win significantly. I suspect that many participants in AppExchange will share the opinions of Geoff Merrick, chief architect of Salesforce partner Okere, who says "his company views being on the AppExchange as a way of developing name recognition rather than as a source of revenue". The venture is new, and the verdict is not yet in. Let's see.

Google [210-216] is included here on the basis of extending the advertising market into the Long Tail with its Adwords and AdSense programs. Traditional advertising, Anderson says, "is a classic, hit-centric industry where high costs enforce a focus on the biggest sellers and buyers" [210]. Now, with customizable search engines (maps, images, etc), and the fact that most search terms are different (no surprise there) Anderson claims that Google is "barreling down the Long Tail of everything" [206].

The other side: The portrayal of "traditional advertising" is a straw man, like so many of the setups for the stories in this book. Traditional advertising is not just car companies advertising on prime-time television, it includes classifieds, Yellow Pages ads, flyers inserted in local newpapers, and so on. And does the Google money come from nowhere, or is this a shift of advertising budgets for small players from these local-focused efforts onto the Internet? There is nothing here to tell us. If advertising is shifting from local papers to Google Adsense, you can't just close one eye and say "I see a Long Tail". Well, you can, but it doesn't mean much.

Even as a story of business success, there are no figures here. How much of Google's revenue comes from its "Long Tail" of advertising? He doesn't say. Somehow the vaunted openness that the book is so keen on always stops one step short of actual revenue breakdowns, whether its Netflix or Google. Anderson does admit that "Although most of its [Google's] revenues come from the head of the curve, most of its customers are somewhere in the tail" [215], which makes you wonder what the revenue pattern is for Google. At the time of its $1B investment in AOL just over a year ago, the BBC reported that "AOL is currently Google's biggest customer. During the first nine months of this year [2005], it accounted for about $429m, or 10% of Google's revenue."

Sometimes I feel like I'm nipping round the edges of the ideas in this book, but the lack of substance and lack of solid figures continues to irritate. Big Picture thinking is one thing, but this hyper-optimistic selective vision is another.

Let's just be clear here - I'm sure that there will be many success stories in the coming years of companies who build aggregation platforms for various kinds of content, and who make a LOT of money doing so. I'm just not convinced that most of their revenue will come from "the Tail" of their content. Despite the talk of "democracy" I'm not convinced that the residents of the Tail will benefit much; and I'm definitely not convinced the net effect on our culture is one of increased real variety and diversity.

The Long Tail 12 - The Infinite Screen

This is another part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 12 - The Infinite Screen. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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Should we give Chris Anderson a break when it comes to Google Video?

The second sentence of Chapter 12 is "On January 19, 2006, Google unveiled Google Video, the ultimate Long Tail marketplace of the moving image" [193]. Of course, Google Video has been what us pre-digital folks call a "total bust" and YouTube (which doesn't get a mention in the book) is everywhere - so much so that Google bought it.

Well, in January 2007 Chris Anderson admitted that he got it wrong:

This is not to say that there aren't many things I don't cover in the book but should have, and a few things I did cover but shouldn't have *cough* Google Video *cough*.

So yes, let's give him a break. I mean, who knew? Not me. So let's put it on record that I'm giving him a free pass on this one.

But back to the point. Chapter 12 argues that TV is facing a Long Tail challenge from Internet video, and it starts off by charting the rise of Internet video with a comparison:

MSNBC's The Abrams Report, with a multimillion-dollar budget and a crew of dozens was at the time of this writing watched by an average of 215,000 homes per day. Rocketboom, a Jon Stewart-like comedy news program created online by exactly two people for the cost of some videotapes, two lights, and a cardboard map, was watched by 200,000 homes per day over the same period. Now it's selling advertising and got $40,000 for the five thirty-second spots in its first week. Not quite as high as broadcast TV revenues, perhaps, but the networks would kill for those margins.
...A generation that grew up online and developed its media consumption habits in the bandwidth paradise of American university dorm rooms is now totally comfortable watching video on a computer screen. [193]

Rocketboom may be a comedy news program (5 minutes per day) but let's just note it isn't news. There is no investigation going on, just some messing around with a camera, and studio comedy is pretty cheap no matter how you do it (that's why the cable channels had all those stand-ups on until they discovered reality TV - comedians come cheap). So the financial comparison is a bit apples and oranges.

But the big thing here is to ask where the Rocketboom numbers come from. We've seen that Chris Anderson is relentlessly optimistic in his view of internet technologies, and he lets that attitude get in the way of his objectivity here. Those first-week ads were something of a publicity stunt, bein auctioned on eBay according the the MIT Advertising Lab. A recent posting by the same MIT Advertising Lab shows that the story is different now:

Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank. Advertising is not doing it. "It's frustrating that we haven't worked it out by now," said the daily video blog's founder, Andrew Baron. "Even though we have a relatively large audience, advertisers are just not happy to do 'small deals,' he explained in an interview. Baron says there are 200,000 downloads of Rocketboom shows, seven days a week. 'They say they want to blast their commercials to millions of people.' So, Rocketboom is again toying with the idea of charging for content. (MarketWatch)

Andrew Baron last summer: "Or maybe in the future we will decide to take a hit and not run ads some days because we could afford to."

Wonder what happened to the Rocketboom being shown on TiVo.

The rule, which Mr. Anderson knows full well, is that you don't believe what people say about themselves, especially when they're trying to sell something. Let's take a closer look at some claims about the commercials and the viewership.

In October 2006 "Baron said he's just done a deal worth $80,000 for a week of commercials in his videoblog.  Claiming a daily audience of some 300,000 people, Baron could be getting more than a $55 CPM for his ads.    You could get a discount, though. He'll sell you a week of spots for $60,000 - if he likes the commercial content." 

Another commentator, Ze Frank, has challenged the Rocketboom numbers, noting some inconsistency in the figures Baron has reported over time:

  "Rocketboom is watched by 350,000 people a day."
April 21, 2006: Rolling Stone magazine (link)

  "[Rocketboom's] audience is up about 100,000 the last month, to about 400,000 a day."
August 10, 2006: Dow Jones MarketWatch (link) 

  Q: "Since Amanda left, have you seen any change in the audience?"
A: "It's grown a bit."
October 11, 2006: Future of PR Conference (link) 

  "...over 300,000 downloads per day."
October 24, 2006 blog post (link)

Businessweek's Heather Green has chimed in too, suggesting that the October figure of "over 300,000 downloads" was an overestimate by about 50%. And how downloads translates into viewers is another issue entirely - does everyone watch to the end of the show, or do they drop it when a friend signs on to MSN? The picture - presented so breezily by Chris Anderson - is complex and obscure, and probably not nearly as dramatic as he makes it look.

The same problem appears elsewhere in Internet advertising-driven sites. There has been controversy over Second Life's claims, nicely summarized by The Register's Shaun Rudolph. There have been complaints about how difficult it is to cancel accounts created on a speculative whim at numerous sites - those account numbers translate into potential advertising money. And the effectiveness of web advertising itself is open to debate, with some serious estimates of "click fraud" being around 15% of all clicks - which translates into about $1 billion over charged to advertisers.

So - don't trust self-reported numbers, especially if they support your thesis. Now on with the rest of the chapter.

A Tail for the Taking [194-196] sets out the reason why Anderson sees TV as vulnerable to alternatives - there's a lot of content, most of it not available to us for purely technological reasons, so "the ratio of produced content to available content is higher than in any other industry" [196]. It's a good point, and to his credit he goes on to point out one of the problems - it's not the technology, it's the issue of rights, which is a rat's nest. It's easy to think that the Internet is doing away with old-fashioned laws - and it does challenge many - but let's remember that Napster (the real Napster, that is) got beaten by the law. It's not impotent yet.

TV Outside the Box [196-197] suggests that new material on the Internet could more effectively challenge TV because the rights issues associated with old content are not so problematic.  The section has a brief description of one such effort: Barrio305 - a web-only TV service for "urban Latin culture" [197] that each day "streams about 50,000 minutes of video to 5,000 unique users" [197] built on the Brightcove video distribution platform. It's an interesting story, but just a hint of one of many possible futures. Nothing definitive yet, that's for sure. And where do those figures come from? The book has no indication, in endnotes or anywhere else. In a recent interview the owners claim "about 10,000 viewers" daily. Who knows?

Shorter, Faster, Smaller [198-199] continues the argument in a small way. It points out that videos on the web are much smaller than TV shows" about 3 minutes instead of 30. Anderson thinks that the "arbitrary middle [of 30 minute shows] will not hold" [199]. So this is a nice setup for an argument. So now can we see some data...

Hollywood @ Home [199-200] No we can't. The chapter switches to "The other form of video that will be transformed in a Long Tail world is movies". We're done with TV apparently - like a 3 minute video the story was over before it got started. Is TV going to change? Sure. Will it go "Long Tail"? Who knows?

One other point about this chapter. Given that Internet video is a different beast from TV - as he says here - maybe the comparison of TV to Internet video is not quite the right one when it comes to describing a change in culture. They both come at us through a screen, but if they are different things then the behaviour trend is not simply TV -> Internet video. There is also Books -> Internet video, and TV -> video games (a "Short Head" form of entertainment), and so on.

In looking at the way things change we have to forget the screen. It's natural to think of things that come through monitors as being kind of like things that come through TV screens, but there are other ways to think. MySpace and Facebook, for example, are more about conversation than media. And if we want to call these forms of activity "Long Tail" then let's remember that the phone companies could be called the ultimate Long Tail business - capturing big company phone bills but making most of their money off those millions of little individual conversations ("verbal production?") and making money off them because there are so many. There's nothing new about providing a service to many people and making money off them. Oil companies make a lot of money selling to hundreds of millions of individual car owners.

As for movies, as Anderson points out, the way we watch them has expanded from movie theatres to TV, rented DVDs, and now downloaded movies onto hard drives, which will surely become more common in the next two or three years. With each expansion, the nature of the business changes. For Anderson, the complex development is a simple story:

What the VCR and the video rental store hinted at was the rise of the age of infinite choice. Those stores increased the available selection of movies of any given Saturday night a hundredfold. Today, Netflix increases it a thousandfold. The Internet will increase it a gazillionfold.
Every time a new technology enables more choice, whether it's the VCR or the Internet, consumers clamor for it. Choice is simply what we want and, apparently, what we've always wanted.

gazillionfold???

This big conclusion is speculation balanced on top of some very frail data in this chapter. As for whether choice is really "what we want and, apparently, what we've always wanted", well someone could write a book about that.

The Long Tail 11.2 - Living in a Niche Culture (2)

This is another part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the second half of Chapter 11 - Living in a Niche Culture. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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The Rise of Massively Parallel Culture [182-185] reveals yet another of Chris Anderson's weaknesses: as Editor of Wired Magazine in San Francisco he is surrounded by "geek friends" [182].

The Long Tail worldview is digital-optimist-libertarian, is characteristic of Silicon Valley - a culture called Cyberselfish in the book of the same name by Wired contributor Pauline Borsook. As The New York Times summarizes:

Ms. Borsook contends that many of the favorite arguments of technolibertarians come from ''bionomics'' -- that is, they like to use metaphors drawn from biology to explain economic behavior and endorse a decentralized free-market system. Reduced to a bumper slogan, Ms. Borsook writes, bionomics states that ''the economy is a rain forest''; in other words, it suggests that ''no one can manage or engineer a rain forest, and rain forests are happiest when they are left alone to evolve, which will then benefit all the happy monkeys, pretty butterflies and funny tapirs that live in them.''

Cyberselfish is a few years old now (but a good read nonetheless), and bionomics is a bit last-generation these days, but judging from The Long Tail not much has changed.  The outlook is self-involved and, to be frank, self-important. Chris Anderson looks out from Silicon Valley at the rest of the world and doesn't know a whole lot about it - and he doesn't think it important to know about it. When he quotes Karl Marx [62] he doesn't actually quote Marx, he quotes a report on digital technology by think tank Demos. The Long Tail is a book on culture with no reference to life outside the USA (except for anime videos). Chris Anderson sees no reason to pay attention to  economists or social scientists (not a single economist who deals in the economics of information apart from his Berkeley neighbour Hal Varian, for example - no Stiglitz or Akerlof here), but calls essayist Clay Shirky "a prominent thinker". He quotes his intellectual stablemates Richard Posner, Virginia Postrel, and George Gilder, and says James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds - a quick read, but not deep - "needs to be read". There's nothing wrong with quoting these people, but the contrast between his references to a certain kind of thinker from a certain kind of place and his complete neglect of so many other strands of thought is stark, especially in a book that does not claim any distinct political outlook.

This narrowness of vision is surely why he calls his own work "research" even when he is discovering things well known by many others. He is an intellectual imperialist: Columbus "discovering" America all over again - thinkers from outside his own intellectual neighbourhood just don't count. The people who endorse the book are of course, as already pointed out, a coterie of Silicon Valley digerati (and the aforementioned Mr. Surowiecki).

The outlook of the author and the audience for the book come through in the terminology he uses. "Massively parallel" is a computing term - elsewhere he's all, like, "impedance mismatch" and "fractal" and "network economics" and "meme" - the buzzwords of computer engineers and the Santa Fe Institute.

Given this outlook, it is not surprising that it takes Mr. Anderson just a couple of pages of sketchy story telling - references to a bunch of Internet "viral memes" such as Dancing Babies and the truly disgusting "goatse" picture - before he can conclude that the online world - his world - is far more diverse than the world outside his valley. "In short, we're seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture." [184] He claims that, while the diversity of humanity "has always been true, but it's only now something that we can act on. The resulting rise of niche culture will reshape the social landscape. People are re-forming into thousands of cultural tribes of interest, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests." [184] The narrowness of his own intellectual horizons, and the proportion of his influences that hail from California, suggest that this is less true than he would like to think.

Yochai Benkler is an interesting writer who Anderson pays attention to, although not in The Long Tail. Benkler has a much better picture of the way that the online shift is changing our culture, and what happens when "people shift their attention online" [181]. The picture he gives (Chapter 10 of The Wealth of Networks) documents that the online world is not one of "virtual communities" heralded by the optimists, and is not one of isolation and alienation feared by the pessimists. Instead, he argues that users "increase their connections with preexisting relations" [363] and leads to "weak ties" of networked individuals (rather than the stronger ties implied by the word "community") in the new relationships that we form. There is little indication of "tribes of interest", with the close ties that the phrase suggests, emerging online.

The section ends with a rare quote from an intellectual outside Anderson's usual sphere of influence: "In 1958, Raymond williams, the Marxist sociologist, wrote in Culture and Society: 'There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.' He was more right than he knew." [185] Now maybe he means something other than the way I read this, but the sentence strikes me as remarkably arrogant. To assert that Williams, a first-rank thinker and hugely influential in our understanding of the ways that culture and society influence each other, was "more right than he knew" is not only patronizing, but patronizing in an innapropriate, almost embarrassing way given the relative intellectual standing of the two.

If the New Fits [185-189] is about blogs - a truly interesting development (especially for us bloggers). He focuses on two influential blogs (from the short head?): Daily Kos and Instapundit and points out that they are influential. As I argued in the notes to Chapter 5, he will get no argument from me that the development of social software as a platform for both publishing and conversation, is an important development - but it ain't Long Tail.

A Million Little Pieces [189-191] starts off by asking if a "fragmented culture [is]  better or worse culture"? [189], and raises the question of whether the digital world may be a place where "you need not come across topics and view that you have not sought out." [189] - creating a polarized world of insular thought where, as he quotes Christine Rosen, "we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality" [190]. Anderson asks "Is Rosen right? I suspect not" [190] and then goes on a little idealistic detour that wanders between a paean to the openness and diversity of the online world. It is easy to agree with  the statement that "Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it's told from a narrow range of experts and institutions" [191], but less easy to see what it has to do with the Long Tail - a tale where our access to variety is channelled through a small number of aggregators whose recommendation systems are private and hidden - a narrow range of (machine-based) experts and institutions indeed.

His optimism is engaging: "I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less" [191]. To dispute this seems Luddite in the colloquial sense - actual Luddites being admirable, or at lease understandable, and Scrooge-like. But one can see opportunities in the Internet - real innovation, of real novelty, and real social changes - without subscribing to The Long Tail's particular muddled vision of commercial giants and social software platforms.

The Long Tail 11.1 - Living in a Niche Culture (1)

This is another part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the first part of Chapter 11 - Living in a Niche Culture. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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We're getting towards the end of the book now, and it is moving on from the core material to some speculative asides about broader issues. The material in this chapter illustrates the reasons for the book's success and also one of its most pervasive weaknesses - which is all about the meaning of the title. Throughout the book, Chris Anderson uses the phrase "The Long Tail" to mean several different things.

1.     It's a business model (create a profitable business by "selling less of more")  
2. It's a commentary on the benefits of Internet commerce (online commerce is more diverse than those old physical shelves)  
3.     It's a trendspotting book about changes to contemporary culture (the end of the hit parade, the fall of the blockbuster)
   

The shift back and forth between these different meanings is what makes the book so frustrating. Anderson wants to eat his cake and have it too - which is the theme for this posting.

When it suits, Anderson can be very cautious about what he means by "The Long Tail". Witness two entries in his blog. First, here's part of his response to Lee Gomes's article, which I've mentioned a few times:

First, the book doesn't claim that there are any cases where sales of products not available in the dominant bricks-and-mortar retailer in a sector (my definition of "tail") are larger than the sales of products that are available in that retailer ("head")... Which is why the language Gomes cites from the book jacket is actually all phrased in the future conditional tense ("What happens when the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of a few items that sell millions each?").

That "future conditional" thing is really a bit precious isn't it?

Or here, in a post he calls What The Long Tail Isn't:

There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for "fringe"... for Long Tail effects to work, you need both a head of relatively few hits and a tail of many niches, so that recommendations and other filters can lead consumers from one to the other.

A tail without a head is too noisy and apparently random to get consumer traction; people need to start with the familiar and then move, via trusted recommendations, to the unfamiliar. Likewise a head without a tail is too limited in choice; the odds of finding a niche you want are too low to bother exploring much beyond what you already know.

Thus the two big Long Tail opportunities are:

1.     Aggregating hits and niches into a one big curve, from head to tail.  
2.     Creating content and products that can plug into someone else's aggregated curve.  

He goes on to list some other things that "The Long Tail Isn't":

•    Commodification - The LT is about nicheification, which is different.      
•    Simple variety - Offering a few different choices or a bit of customization (like the sandwich filling options in the risible example above) is not enough. Long Tail effects kick in when you're expanding variety and choice by orders of magnitude--from 10x to infinity.      
•     The case for an all amateur, self-published future - The LT will probably have as much commercial content as ever. It will just be joined by far more amateur fare, forming a relatively seamless continuum from pros to ams.      
•    The actual end of hits - The LT ends the tyranny of hits, shifting the market equally to niches. But it certainly acknowledges that some things will continue to be a lot more popular than others. Powerlaw distributions are as natural as diversity itself.  
•    A focus on small markets at the exclusion of large ones - Again, you need both hits and niches to allow the filters and recommendation engines to work, driving demand down the curve from the known to the unknown.      
•    Just any powerlaw - Powerlaws are ubiquitous. Long Tails are not. The first shows up anywhere you have variety, inequality, and network effects (word of mouth). The second requires massive variety and a wide range between the hits and niches. After all, many short tails are simply truncated powerlaw distributions. They just aren't, er, long.  

Mr. Anderson wants to have it both ways.

He wants to disown the wilder uses of his catch phrase, ignoring the fact that the catchiness is the core of its popularity and influence. Also, he is not immune to misusing the phrase himself. He wants to say that "offering a few choices or a bit of customization" is not Long Tail - yet he writes about twenty varieties of flour as the "Long Tail of flour" [11], or customized T-shirts as the "Long Tail of fashion " [50]. He disowns "a focus on small markets at the exclusion of large ones", and yet writes that microbreweries are the "Long Tail of beer" [50]. He says that "just any powerlaw" is not a long tail and yet describes cities as "The Long Tail of urban space" [150] and Al Qaeda as "The Long Tail of national security" [50]? If it wasn't for the aura of universality that such misuses create then the thesis of the book would have attracted much less attention than it has.

The first section of Chapter 11 is about The History of House Sound of Chicago, a book by Stuart Cosgrove. The emergence of this form of music in the early 1980s, from the embers of disco, is the story of a "proto-Long Tail music culture" [177]. Mr. Anderson backs up the claim by reference to the three forces of the Long Tail from Chapter 4:

• "It started with the spread of  affordable technology, from mixing decks to multitrack recorders. That's the first force of the Long Tail, the democratization of the tools of production." [178]
• An explosion of records created the need for a way for people to get to them: "Which is exactly what clubs and warehouse parties offered, thus providing the necessary second force -- democratized distribution" [179]
• The "hyperspecialized genres" of house music were identified by a proliferation of distinct record labels, sometimes owned by the same company: "Indie record labels are like tags, providing clues to which microgenre a track is likely to be" [179]. This "connects supply and demand" which is his third force.

Does Chicago House music have anything to do with the Long Tail? Well, what I know about House music could fit on a single 45rpm label, but the answer is clearly No.

The story of the House Sound of Chicago is a familiar story about the emergence of a subculture in a particular physical place and time - it is an example of variety and minority-interest culture emerging from the very offline, physical proximity whose limitations he decries in the remainder of the book.

Looking back at the criteria for something to be Long Tail, there is nothing here about either "Aggregating hits and niches into a one big curve, from head to tail" or "Creating content and products that can plug into someone else's aggregated curve." Whereas Anderson claims that The Long Tail is not "a focus on small markets at the exclusion of large ones", the indie music he is invoking did just that. As for his "three forces": folk music in the broadest sense has always been produced by cheap technology, from harmonicas to fiddles to guitars to whistles, so there is nothing new there. Using clubs and parties as a way to share and provide access to music? Been done for hundreds or thousands of years. And the idea of labels as being "like tags" is simply a way of relating the culture of music to the culture his core audience is familiar with, which is the online computer world.

Elsewhere, Anderson laments that the physical world limits cultural diversity because of what we might call the Bollywood Problem: culture that appeals to a specific group of widely dispersed people has to reach a certain threshold of appeal in a single locale before being viable, and so might be viable nowhere (well, in North America anyway). One of the many things he neglects about the cultural phenomena at the core of his book is the fact that much of culture is not a "market" with distinct supply and demand. Culture as a participatory activity involves an intermingling of supply and demand, and it is precisely the specific nature of physical environments that leads to the development of new genres and flavours of music, whether it's Northern Soul or the collectivist music ethic that started in Montreal with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and has now given us the snow-influenced best band in the world and has also travelled down the 401 to Toronto to produce the almost-great Broken Social Scene.

From "Or" Culture to "And" Culture [180-182] continues with the big statements that Anderson disowns elsewhere, starting off with "The Long Tail is nothing more than infinite choice" [180]. Once people get on the internet "they don't just go from one media outlet to another -- they simply scatter. Infinite choice equals ultimate fragmentation" [181]. Yet he simultaneously wants to say that this is "simply a rebalancing of the equation, an evolution from an 'Or' era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. subcultures) to an 'And' era... Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass." [182]

So if "Mass culture will not fall" and the Long Tail is not "The actual end of hits" then why does he entitle a chapter "The Rise and Fall of the Hit", or title sections "Who Killed the Hit Album?" [33] or "The End of the Hit Parade" [31]? or write "We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation" [40]. Parsing "The End of the Hit Parade" carefully (there is no tense, not even future conditional), you could argue that ending the Hit Parade is different from Hits themselves, but I think it's fair to say, in a book as rhetorical as this one, the author is out to create an impression that we are on the edge of a bigger transition than a mere rebalancing of the equation.

I'd like to say that Mr. Anderson needs to make up his mind, but plainly he doesn't need to at all. The ability to switch back and forth between eschatology and business models is what gives the book its appeal, and he's done very well by it. The fact that it is inconsistent to the point of foolishness appears not to matter. Too bad.

The Long Tail 10.1 - A Short Note

This set of posts has been a lot of fun. Thanks to those who have given me feedback along the way, and to those (like Dave of How To Furnish a Room and RAD) who have linked to it and said nice things about it. If you're looking for a book to read, by the way, How To Furnish a Room is a great source of ideas.

I had some notes on each chapter and an idea of what I wanted to do with them once I finished reading The Long Tail, but it really is true that writing is a way of finding out what you think, so my views on the book have expanded along the way.

When I started out, I thought it would be enough to just go through the book as I have been doing, but now I don't think that will quite do the trick. The book is really a Big Picture book, so once I get to the end (four more chapters) I think I'll post a couple of Big Picture posts to wrap it up. Then I'll really have to return the book to the library and read something else.

The Long Tail 10 - The Paradise of Choice

This is another part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 10 - The Paradise of Choice. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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The purpose of this chapter is to counter "the notion that 'too much choice' is overwhelming, a belief so common and ill-founded that it deserves its own chapter" [167].

The last 50 years have seen "an explosion of variety" [169], which Anderson ascribes to three factors. The first is "globalization and the hyperefficient supply chains it brings"; the second is the change in the population - in the US, he mentions ethnic diversity and increasing affluence, leading to a cultural shift from "I want to be normal" to "I want to be special"; the third is The Long Tail - or the proliferation of variety brought about by iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, and eBay.

But there's variety and then there's variety. Grocery shopping is often a focus for this kind of discussion (and the book uses it in the next section) so let's use supermarkets as a way into the topic. For me, the proliferation of options at the cheese counter is a great thing: the range of options there seems to me a real variety. On the other hand, the toothpaste section (over forty different types of toothpaste) does not seem to be real variety. Now this could just be me, who likes cheese and can't really be bothered about toothpaste as long as it does the job, but I think it's more than that. There is another difference between the two, and it's the issue of manufacturers or suppliers. The cheese counter contains products from a variety of producers, while the toothpaste shelves contain products mainly from two producers - Colgate-Palmolive has 37% of the American market; Procter & Gamble (makers of Crest and now merged with Gillette) follow with 34% - with a few "smaller" players like GlaxoSmithKline (Aquafresh) and Unilever filling out the remainder. If anything, the toothpaste market has become more dominated over the years by this small number of companies; meanwhile, the profusion of items on the shelf is growing. Oligopoly Watch (from a few years ago)  describes these twin trends of corporate consolidation and product profusion in the world of toothpaste. Is the combination an increase or a decrease in real "choice" and "variety"?

Anderson is as ebulliently optimistic as ever that the increase in number of products is simply a reflection of what we consumers want - "More choice really is better" [174], but very well-known research by Richard Schmalensee showed that the proliferation of toothpaste varieties may have little to do with responding to consumer demand, and be more about preventing other companies from getting a foothold in the market. Back in 1978 he looked at the ready-to-eat breakfast cereal market, where six companies dominated the market and introduced eighty different brands between 1950 and 1972 - more choice, for sure. Now Schmalensee is no radical - he was on Microsoft's team in their anti-trust suit, arguing that Microsoft is not a monopoly - but he concluded that this particular case of product proliferation was all about trying to deter entry by other companies. The strategy is to "pack the product space and leave no profitable niche unfilled" (this from the standard graduate text by Tirole, p. 346). Schmalensee showed "how a cartel (a group of firms that act as a single monopolist) crowds a product space". The cartel in this case needs no explicit collusion, but the strategies of the incumbent firms complement each other to produce the same effect as a monopoly. The result - higher prices for consumers, as the incumbent firms can raise prices without new competitors coming to undercut them.

How much of the "explosion of variety" that we have experienced is real variety, and how much is entry deterrence and the ability to raise prices? It requires a lot more space and expertise than I have to pick apart what's what in the myriad of different retail spaces, but it is something to think about when standing in front of a wall of shampoo, deodorant, mustard, breakfast cereal, or whatever. One would think that if The Long Tail is, among other things, an "economics research project" [11] and "a preview of 21st century economics" [11] then its author might have looked a little harder at the work of actual economists, however 20th century they might be.

Too Much Choice? [170-172] is a quick summary of one of the points made in Barry Schwartz's excellent book The Paradox of Choice. It describes one well-known experiment that Schwartz talks about on pages 19-20, carried out originally by Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University. The experimenters set up a table at a specialty food store and offered customers a taste of a range of jams, and a $1 coupon to use against the purchase of a jam. When only 6 jams were put on the table, 30 percent of customers went on to buy a jar of jam; when 24 jams were put on the table, only 3 percent did. Faced with extra options, people shied away from choosing any of them. After presenting the experiment, Anderson goes on to say:

Schwartz describes the conclusion this way:

As the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

I found those sentences on page 2 of the book (The Long Tail does not indicate where they came from - it's endnotes are lousy). They are separate from the jam experiment (pp 19-20). Schwartz's book addresses a broad range of questions about the proliferation of choices that we are faced with, and while the sentences do reflect an argument that Schwartz makes, it oversimplifies his reaction to this particular experiment.

Anderson's response to Schwarts is to say:

I'm skeptical. The alternative to letting people choose is choosing for them. The lessons of a century of retail science (along with the history of Soviet department stores) are that this is not what most consumers want [171].

His rebuttal does not do justice to The Paradox of Choice. Two sentences before the convenient quotation above, Schwartz says "When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable", and a few sentences after them he says "Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well-being. Healthy people want and need to direct their own lives". So Schwartz is clearly not advocating Soviet department stores here, or the elimination of personal choice. The suggestion that the only options are "letting people choose" or "choosing for them" is a silly false dichotomy that I got accused of with my book too. There are many forms of choice, from individual consumer choice to our choices as citizens to collective choices - not just "choosing for them". Anderson is substituting a quick dig for real argument. It's weak. But then, Schwartz's book is detailed, subtle, and packed full of references to work by other people...

In fact, Schwartz's book is more about how to cope with the profusion of choice than advocating a removal of it. One of eleven recommendations he makes is to "satisfice", but Anderson ignores the other ten and says: "Schwartz recommends that consumers 'satisfice,' in the jargon of social science, not 'maximize'. In other words, they'd be happier if they just settled for what was in front of them rather than obsessing over whether something else might be even better" [171]. Contrast this with Schwartz's actual definition of "satisfice" (p78):

To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

I don't think Anderson's paraphrase is a fair one, and I don't think his arguments refute much of The Paradox of Choice. (They also don't even start addressing most of the problems that are the subject of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, but that's another story).

Variety is Not Enough [172-175] starts out by refuting Iyengar's jam experiment. Anderson wrote to Iyengar and asked "why the people who should actually know the most about consumer choice in a supermarket were ignoring their [Iyengar and coworkers'] conclusions" [172]. He summarizes her reply (and a work in progress [PDF download]) as "The solution, they found, is to order the choice in ways that actually help the consumers" [173]. And with this, Anderson's faith in limitless choice restored and he is off to find out how online resellers manage to guide people through their choices.

But just as Schwartz is more nuanced than Anderson gives him credit for, so Iyengar and coworkers are more nuanced in their conclusions. They distinguish "Preference Constructors" from "Preference Matchers". Preference Matchers are often experienced with the particular choice they are faced with (choosing a cup of Starbucks coffee is one they discuss); they are "someone who enters the decision making task looking for either a specific option or an option that possesses a number of pre-defined attributes. This type of chooser restricts the multitude of available options in a purchasing situation by creating “consideration sets,” or sets of options with a high probability of containing his or her optimal choice". Meanwhile "Preference Constructors" are those approaching the choice for the first time. Faced with a dizzying array (24 jams) such a chooser may shy away. They can be helped by providing some guidance: "To enable Preference Constructors to distinguish a hazelnut steamer from a vanilla chai and thus successfully form their preference criteria before identifying their preferred option, these decision makers may require more than a limitless, unstructured choice set." Here is the basis for Anderson's optimism.

His contention is that online retailers are ideally placed to guide you through the choice in a comfortable way, so that us consumers are not faced with the 24-jam problem. But I'm just an old cynic. Whereas Chris Anderson is thankful for all this guidance he's getting, I'm just suspicious. As George Akerlof wrote (and he knows about people guiding you through choices), the problem goes back as far as horse trading: "“if he wants   to sell that horse, do I really want to buy   it?” Such questioning is fundamental to the market for   horses and used cars, but it is also at least minimally present   in every market transaction."

Here's Anderson's take on how online retailers can guide people through a proliferation of choices.

There are a nearly infinite number [nitpick alert: "nearly infinite"??? - TS] of techniques to tap the latent information in a marketplace and make that selection process easier. You can sort by price, by ratings, by date, and by genre. You can read customer reviews. You can compare prices across products and, if you want, head off to Google to find out as much about the product as you can imagine. Recommendations suggest products that 'people like you' have been buying, and surprisingly enough, they're often on-target. Even if you know nothing about the category, ranking best-sellers will reveal the most popular choice, which both makes selection easier and also tends to minimize post-sale regret. After all, if everyone else picked a given product, it can't be that bad. [173]

I confess I did a double-take when I read that paragraph. The first half is confusing: is the goal of "supplementing an unstructured choice set" really accomplished by adding to that bewildering array a second bewildering array of different techniques to find out bits and pieces about the merits of different choices? I don't think so. And the second half is a concise argument as to why online retailers so often fail to drive demand down to The Long Tail - in direct contrast to what he claims elsewhere. Anything that gets people to choose an item just because other people have chosen it leads to increasing returns. Once you've chosen it, it will be recommended to other people because you bought it, and so on. Note that without recommendations, you can't even tell if they liked it or not once they bought it. And pointing people to best sellers because "it can't be all that bad"? This is the logic of the blockbuster. Nevertheless, Anderson is so pleased with his conclusion that he reiterates it three times: "More choice really is better... The paradox of choice turned out to be more about the poverty of help in making that choice than a rejection of plenty. Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it's liberating" [174].

The other argument that Anderson has in favour of unrestricted choice is taken from libertarian journalist Virginia Postrel, and is again about help. It is true that, around most choices that are both expensive and complex, an industry of brokers rises up. Real estate agents, wedding planners, financial planners and so on, all "help us be ourselves" [174]. Another way of looking at such an industry is that it represents the cost of choosing (wedding planners are not free, after all): the rise of such an industry indicates that there is a cost to choice that we are prepared to pay substantially for, but this is in itself neither an argument for or against the proliferation of variety and pseudo-variety that we are immersed in.

The Economics of Variety [175-176] finishes the chapter by asking "Does more choice encourage consumers to buy more?" [175], and concluding that, by making choices easier, digital distribution "widens the field of possible customers and shortens the search time. Over time, this should increase sales and grow the overall market. As we saw in Chapter 8, longer tails can be thicker too" [176].

I'm not entirely sure what he means here by "the overall market", but if he is claiming - as I think he is - that the overall economy will grow because people will buy more stuff, then this is a claim that needs a lot of substantiation. The money, after all, has to come from somewhere. Unless he is advocating a further increase in consumer debt as a way of boosting the overall economy, then I'm not sure what his argument is.

But then that's how I feel about the whole book, of course. The Long Tail sounds nice, and it would be great if online retail could not only break the tyranny of the blockbuster and promote a diverse niche culture, but also boost the economy at the same time - but just because it would be nice doesn't make it so, and the book continues to fail to convince.

The Long Tail 9.3 - The Short Head Part 2

This is another part of my critical reader's companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the second half of Chapter 9 - The Short Head. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

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The second half of Chapter 9 is a meandering stroll around the topic of "finding things". It's an odd place for it in the book - this reads like a part of Chapter 7 - The New Tastemakers that has wandered into the wrong part of the book by mistake. Warning - this is even more rambling than the other posts in the series: it is more of a set of half-baked thoughts than a coherent thesis. But hey, this is a blog.

In the Library of Misshelved Books [156-160] starts off this way: "One of the most vexing problems with physical goods is that they force us into crude categorization and static taxonomies, as we saw with Wal-Mart. That means a windbreaker can be in the 'Jackets' section or the 'Sports' section, but not in a 'Blue' section or 'Nylon' section" [156]. A thing has to be in one place or another but not both, and so can be difficult to find. In the online world, things can be in many places at once, and this opens new doors: "The efficiency and success of online retail have illuminated the cost of traditional retail's inflexibility and taxonomical oversimplification. It's one thing to have high prices or limited selection; it's quite another to simply be able to help people find what they want". [157]

Despite this start, the section is mainly about libraries. It describes the Dewey Decimal System for organizing books and its cultural biases and limitations. The numbers from 200 to 300, for example, are "Religion", but all religions apart from Christianity are lumped into the interval from 290 to 300. But although the cultural bias of the Dewey Decimal System is clear, its practical consequences are small because, as any library aficionado knows, the Dewey Decimal System goes on several places past the decimal point. As a result you can fit as many books between 290 and 300 as in any other interval, because  The Long Tail, for example, is "658.802 And"; No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart is "306.123 Sle". Anyone who has spent time in a library knows there are some areas where the numbers fly by and others where there are whole shelves that have the same number up to the second decimal place. But that's OK, because additional numbers are free: you could say that the Dewey Decimal System exploits the free shelf space of numbers to extend into the Long Tail of digits. (Aaargh! I have to give Anderson this - the phrase is very infectious.) But anyway, once you have a number for a book, finding it on a shelf is rarely difficult and that's the point.

Shopping in the Miscellaneous Aisle [160-162] starts off by admitting this: "In libraries, at least there is a standard categorization scheme -- the card catalog is there to be searched, and librarians tend to know their stuff" [160]. Haven't seen a card catalog in a while, but it is good to know that Chris Anderson and I agree there is little problem with libraries. So where is there a problem?

Well, it's retail stores: those nylon jackets. And it's true that it can be difficult finding things from time to time (wandering around Toys-R-Us with two pre-school kids was my worst experience, I think). But while this is a section I actually have more agreement with than most in the book, Anderson sets us up again. He complains how difficult it was to look for the Japanese anime classic "Akira" in a Blockbuster store, but "As it turned out, it didn't matter - they didn't have the film" [161]. He contrasts this experience with Amazon, where he types the title into the search bar and gets right to the film immediately, along with recommendations for other films. He also says all films were "in stock and cheaper than Blockbuster. The experience I had with these two stores couldn't have been more different" [161] . He is exaggerating again. This section is about locating things, and if you are searching for something not in stock, then it's not surprising you don't find it.

But let me give credit where credit is due. The access methods that Amazon has built into its site are very impressive and increasingly sophisticated. As examples I looked for two obscure songs: Ken Boothe's 1972 "Freedom Street" and Fontella Bass's "To Be Free" (I couldn't remember the title and had to browse) and found both quickly, complete with sound sample; I also tried to cheat by looking up "The The" - a band with the worst possible name in a Google-dominated world (try finding them) - but Amazon tracked them down.

If the thing you are looking for is a digital product (a category that is growing rapidly, including songs, beginning to include movies and books) then Amazon can take you to it. But if the thing you are looking for is not digital, as in Anderson's example in Chapter 10 of looking for jam, then Amazon can't take you to the product itself. It can take you to an image of it, and written material about it, but sometimes these are not enough. The virtual shelf is somewhere in between an actual shelf and a card catalogue. Some of the items on the virtual shelf are actual items, and others are cards that tell you "we can send you what's described here".

An area not covered by Anderson is browsing - which is what many of us do when looking through music stores, bookstores, or video stores. Amazon is doing wonders improving its browsing experience (the ability to look inside the book being an obvious example), but it is still struggling uphill, I would say.

The Tyranny of Geography [162-164] returns to one of the book's original claims, that geography limits variety: "in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all. Thus, local demand must be a a high enough concentration to compensate for the high costs of physical distribution. In other, more obvious words, not enough local demand equals no store" [163]. The shortfalls in this argument - the various workarounds that we employ, the role of cities in providing that variety and of communities in passing niche products around - were already highlighted by piefuchs in a comment on Chapter 2. It's not that there's no truth to Anderson's claims, but it's just irritating that he stacks the deck in his own argument's favour even here. When looking at the restrictions on physical stores, he sets out the calculation of sales they can make this way [163]:

Sales =
The percentage of the population who might buy
Minus
The percentage not within ten miles of the store
Minus
The percentage that never comes in
Minus
The percentage that won't see the item on the shelf
And so on...

But for some specialist stores in big cities, it could be like this:

Sales =
The percentage of the city population who might buy
Plus
Those from surrounding towns who come in every now and then
Plus
Those who phone in special orders
Plus
Those whose relatives pick up something for them while they are in town
And so on...

Variety in the physical world is, as discussed earlier, much more uneven than in the online world. This heterogeneous nature of the physical world does have some other benefits. A place that is a centre for jazz music stores is also likely to be a centre for jazz clubs in the evening, and to be a place where jazz musicians as well as jazz audiences tend to aggregate. The benefits of such cultural centres spill over from the consumption of culture into the production of culture, and then into the invention of new forms of culture. So while it is true that, just like catalogue shopping increased variety in a convenient way to small-town residents in years past, so online retailers "can reach all those many low-density towns as efficiently as the high-density ones, they can tap the Long Tail of distributed demand" [163-164], it is also true that the homogeneity of the online retail world may erode the vitality of those cultural centres that create the culture they sell.

The same is true - even more so - when it comes to international culture. The online world reaches small countries with the same ease that it reaches big countries, and promises to even out consumer access to cultural goods around the world. But this will do little to even out the production of cultural variety, because cultural variety is a product of the lumpiness of our world. It is the uneven concentrations of people, the barriers between one place and another -- the fact that we are all isolated, to some degree, from people elsewhere in the world and so have to grow within our own communities  -- that lead to cultural diversity, whether its the brass bands of coal mining towns in the North of England or cajun cooking or the Milan opera. Various forms of cultural protection - subsidies to cultural industries, restrictions on imports, national content regulations - have been successfully used all around the world to promote local culture, and so to maintain diversity in the face of economies of scale.

Cultural protection has something of a bad reputation these days. Opponents argue that any culture worth its salt will prosper in a global market, but such an argument neglects the economics of cultural goods, where marginal cost is zero. Any revenue that an American TV show sold to a smaller market gains is gravy for its producers, and as a result American shows will typically be far cheaper for TV stations to broadcast than local fare. Again, cultural production is caught in a vice, with one jaw being those economies of scale driving production geared "for an international audience" and the other jaw being the online world, where endless variety is present in principle but not always in practice.

Skipping ahead a little, Anderson complains that "the Long Tail doesn't have a lobby, so all too often only the Short Head is heard" [167] in legislation of the Internet. But the Long Tail does have a lobby - all those national cultural industries lobbying for the promotion of local culture are part of a struggling Long Tail - but it's not a lobby that gets much support from the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who praise Anderson's book. This should remind us that if we are looking for a route to a "niche driven culture" then Amazon and Netflix and Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes are not the people we should be looking to as guides to take us there.

Scarce Air [164-166] is a return to another earlier topic: broadcast radio and TV. It adds little to the discussion in Chapter 2. Only one paragraph demands comment, and it's the final one where Anderson laments ad clutter on television. In the US, apparently, "following deregulation in the mid-1980s, network TV ad time per hour increased from six minutes and forty-eight seconds in 1982 to twelve minutes and four seconds in 2001" [165] Why? Because viewers had nowhere to go.

The implicit claim is that audiences are now "starting to take back their attention" [166] and refusing to put up with this advertising overload. And yet it seems clear that the main way of making money from online activity has become, thanks to Google, the insertion of pervasive advertising content alongside and interspersed with content that we are actually interested in. To suggest that we are moving away from an advertising-driven culture is possible only with the blinkered view of cultural industries that characterise the whole book. But that's part of his irrepressible ability to see the online world through rose-tinted glasses, a trait continued in the final section, which is...

The Dangers of Hitism [166-167] Here Anderson celebrates those "Kids who started using the Internet as twelve-year-olds in 1995 [and who] turned eighteen (the beginning of Nielsen's 18-34 demographic that is highly coveted by advertisers). The males of the species, in particular, were watching less television. Given a choice between the infinite variety and easy ad-dodging online versus network TV, they were choosing the former... The audience is migrating away from broadcast to the Internet, where niche economics rule" [166].

It takes only a few moments of reflection to realise that the "infinite variety" of the online world was not the only place they were going. They were also spending many hours in the hit-driven world of video games, where endless variations on the theme of war games are aimed at precisely this 18-34 male audience. But Anderson is blind to all manifestations of hit driven culture that don't fit his thesis.

It takes only a few more moments to realise that an environment funded by advertising in which ads are easily avoided will not last for long. Something has to change - either companies whose commercial model is based on advertising will fail or advertising will become more intrusive so we can't avoid it.

The chapter as a whole does not, I would say, advance the Long Tail thesis. Instead, by returning to some of the topics from earlier in the book, it inadvertently opens our eyes to the complexities and subtleties of what it takes to make a world of variety. The Long Tail model of internet commerce is not up to the task of building such a world.