Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/18/tom_slee_long_tail/

The Long Fail: Web 2.0's faith meets the facts

Hope is all you need

By Tom Slee

Posted in Legal, 18th November 2008 11:13 GMT

Guest opinion

The Long Tail has just had another run-in with large amounts of real-world data, and again come out the worse for wear. Tens of millions of music transactions were analyzed by economists and the shape of the sales distribution shows no resemblance to the Pareto (or Power) Curve, 1/x^n of the Long Tail, but a near perfect fit with a log normal, exp(-x^2). So can the Long Tail survive?

I think it can, because there are actually two long tails. One is the Inspirational Tail, rolled out with winning enthusiasm and brio. The other is the the disingenuously Modest Tail that shows itself mainly in response to the critics. So far, the Modest Tail has come to the rescue of the Inspirational Tale, but now the pattern is reversing.

In Chris Anderson's original essay these two tails seemed to be one and the same. That essay was full of eye-opening facts, which seemed to support the inspirational language:

"The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles." But even before the book of the essay hit the shelves the two started to diverge. Amazon's tail turned out to hold not over 50 per cent of the market, but less than 30 per cent. No matter. Chris Anderson rephrased his inspirational claim that the market for niches is bigger than that for hits as a rhetorical question ("What if the non-hits, from healthy niche product to outright misses, all together added up to a market as big as, if not bigger than, the hits themselves?") and when challenged, coyly pointed out that it is "in the future conditional tense".

Another inspirational eye-catcher was "the 98 per cent rule" - that 98 per cent of everything sells if you can just find a way to stock it. Anderson wrote:

The 98 per cent rule turned out to be nearly universal. Apple said that every one of the then one million tracks in iTunes had sold at least once (now its inventory is twice that). Netflix reckoned that 95 percent of its 25,000 DVDs (that’s now 55,000) rented at least once a quarter... And so it went, from company to company.

In response to challenges by Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal, Chris Anderson modestly responded that he didn't really mean it: "He only mentioned the 98 per cent rule to show how he first got interested in the book's overall subject".

Oh.

The pattern continued. The Inspirational Tail says that "we are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation", that "technology is turning mass markets into millions of niches" and asks: "Who killed the hit album?" But the Modest Tail demurs: "I never said hits are dead", and "Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass".

The Inspirational Tail contains "products you can't find anywhere but online". But when a Harvard Business School Professor, Anita Elberse, showed that online stores are as hit-driven as brick-and-mortar ones, the Modest Tail cautioned:

"'Head' is the selection available in the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the market (that would be Wal-Mart in this case). 'Tail' is everything else." Or, there are more niche products online than in bricks-and-mortar stores - as long as you ignore bricks-and-mortar stores that carry niche items.

But with Will Page's latest numbers even the Modest Tail is looking dodgy. The sales distribution, Tens of millions of retail sales, doesn't fit the iconic power-law curve. So what now?

Faith over reason

Fear not, for True Believers, the Inspirational Tail is at hand! Grubby numbers can never disprove the big picture. Chris Anderson believes there must be some peculiar reason why this particular set of numbers doesn't behave: "I'd need to look at the data to see why it didn't follow the powerlaw shape." And then moves us along quickly to the world of search, where the Long Tail is reassuringly "huge". He approvingly quotes Dustin Woodward: "if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you'd still be missing out on 89.4 per cent of all search traffic."

Yet search queries are not a market. By the same logic, the old-fashioned paper-based Yellow Pages would qualify as a long-tail business just because the top 1,000 phone numbers would miss almost all the numbers people look for. And there's nothing new about the Yellow Pages.

As the real world proves frustratingly hit-bound, the Inspirational Tail is heading into the future where it is safe from grubby numbers.

Benoit Felten, an analyst at the Yankee Group, claims that the Long Tail is really about "a potential evolution in content distribution". GigaOm's Matthew Ingram writes that:

"Whatever its flaws, it is still a powerful way of expressing the changes the web has wrought... Whether content producers, distributors and creators want to adapt or not is a different question."

And "media futurist" Gerd Leonhart says that the numbers themselves are irrelevant "because reason usually tries to remove us from our dream, saying that the time is not yet right".

The Long Tail turned out to be attached to a Cheshire cat. It has vanished, leaving nothing but a hopeful smile. But the smile is enough for some. ®

Tom Slee is a computer software professional and author of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. His blog at Whimsley includes a page-by-page critical reader's companion to the Long Tail.