Long Tails and Big Heads
Why Chris Anderson's theory of the digital world might be all wrong.
Updated Monday, July 14, 2008, at 7:25 AM ET
Nearly four years ago, first in a widely cited article and later in a best-selling book, Chris Anderson posited that the Internet, with its vast inventories of books, albums, and movies, would liberate the world from blockbuster schlock. Anderson, the editor of Wired, labeled his concept "the Long Tail," after the shape our digital desires leave on a graph: When we buy stuff online, we can reach beyond big hits and into the "tail" of the demand curve, where we're free to indulge our most obscure passions. Anderson argued that serving our niche interests could also make for booming Web businesses. This was the thrill of the Long Tail—it seemed to offer a way for art and commerce to thrive side-by-side.
Now, just in time for The Long Tail's paperback release, the book has fallen under critical scrutiny. Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, recently examined several years' worth of American movie- and music-sales data. The entertainment business has indeed seen its inventory shifting toward a Long Tail curve, Elberse writes in the Harvard Business Review. The shift is slight, however, and Anderson's Long Tail is also "extremely flat."
It's true that we're now buying more obscure movies and music than ever before. But we're merely nibbling on these niches, Elberse reports, while we continue to gorge on a small selection of hits. In 2007, 24 percent of the nearly 4 million digital songs available for sale through stores like iTunes sold only one copy each, and 91 percent of available tracks sold fewer than 100 copies each. The story is the same for the movie business, where, between 2000 and 2005, the number of titles that were purchased only a few times "almost quadrupled." The Internet offers us a buffet of everything—and yet we're mainly settling for the likes of The Love Guru and You Don't Mess With the Zohan.
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Elberse's findings are more than a little surprising. The Long Tail wasn't just a pet theory; as Anderson sketched it, the phenomenon arose out of actual innovations in commerce. Take Anderson's signal example of Long Tail success, British mountain climber Joe Simpson's Andean-survival story Touching the Void. When it was released in 1988, the book saw only modest success and then essentially disappeared from stores. But a decade later, after Jon Krakauer published Into Thin Air, a mountaineering-survival hit, Simpson's book enjoyed a sudden boom. The cause was online word of mouth—recommendations for Touching the Void on Amazon's Into Thin Air page pushed people to purchase a book they'd never heard of. After it was reissued as a paperback and made into a documentary, Touching the Void's sales eclipsed those of Into Thin Air. Before the Internet, such out-of-the-blue success for a deep-in-the-tail book could never have occurred.
But according to Elberse, that sort of anecdote is the exception. The reason? We're not very adventurous. Elberse examined the rental habits of customers at Quickflix, a Netflix-like service in Australia. She found that no group of customers exhibited "a particular taste for the obscure." Sure, a small number of customers regularly rented films from deep in the catalog—but they tended to be people who watched a lot of movies generally and so had much more "capacity" for venturing into the Long Tail. And still they chose a lot of hits: The most widely traveling Quickflix customers picked only 8 percent of their rentals from the least popular of available titles and 34 percent from among blockbusters.
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