USA Today, Longtailing bigtime

USA Today recently held a roundtable focusing on the Long Tail and published the highlights in a two-page spread last week.  It featured TiVo CEO Mike Ramsey, venture capitalist Roger McNamee, Firefox co-creator Blake Ross, and rapper Chuck D. Some excerpts follow:

Mike Ramsey:

What we've found is that the viewing patterns of people who watch live television — and are therefore restricted to prime time whenever they're home — are dramatically different than the viewing patterns of people who have the choice of just picking whatever they want.

Given the choice, people will migrate towards a much greater variety, and the deal is you've got to make everything available to everybody so that they're not restricted. And if you do, the market for that more esoteric, more specialized stuff is just as big as the market of the mainstream stuff.

Roger McNamee:

The people in the middle have tried to be arbiters of what we could be entertained by. They've been the determinants of what's a hit, what's not a hit. The great thing about the long tail is the consumers get to decide for themselves. They don't need somebody in the middle....What's been wrong is that capital, the money, has always been tied to distribution. The reason my firm exists is to change that, to put the capital with the content, with the creative people.

There's a start-up called Akimbo that's about to ship a product. Its initial programming will be soccer from Europe. It'll have things from India and from other cultures that have never been available because they don't have large-enough audiences to go on satellite or cable, but they have a plenty large-enough, and certainly devoted-enough, audience to go over the Internet.

Not only is it great to see industry leaders completely getting the Long Tail and putting it into practice, but it's especially gratifying to see it discussed with this level of sophistication in a publication as mainstream as USA Today. Credit to Kevin Maney, who moderated, for pulling together the right panel around the right subjects and asking the right questions. And extra special credit for the sidebar with a Long Tail definition that's spot on:

Last fall, Wired magazine identified a trend it dubbed "the long tail," and the term has since caught fire in tech and media circles. Basically, it says that in an era of almost limitless choice, many consumers will gravitate toward the most popular mass-market items, but just as many will move toward items that only a few, niche-market people want.

Take music in an age of Amazon.com and iTunes. A lot of music buyers want the hot new releases. But just as many buy music by lesser-known artists or older music — songs that record stores never would be able to carry but that can be offered online. All that small-market, niche music makes up the long tail.

Until the past few years, mass-market entertainment ruled the industry. In this new digital era, the long tail is becoming at least as powerful a force.

Personally, I think full-page treatment in both The Economist and USA Today in the same week should count as some sort of memetic hat trick, a test of full-spectrum cultural resonance. I can't decide which delights me more.

Comments

[David Palmer]

Chris, between the Economist, USA Today and the Google shareholders' meeting, you seem to really be on a roll. Everyone's quoting you. I guess we'll all have to get on the waiting list to get our copies of the book autographed :)

[R J Keefe]

The Economic Focus was okay, but I was disappointed to find that the fourteen-page "Special Report" on consumer choice via the Internet (April 2-8) made no mention of the long tail. In fact, for anyone familiar with the long tail, the Special Report was extremely stale.

[T J Neville]

Chris

Liked the USA Today piece, but I think their definition of The Long Tail blurs a critical distinction.

“But just as many buy music BY LESSER-KNOWN ARTISTS or OLDER MUSIC — songs that record stores never would be able to carry but that can be offered online. All that small-market, niche music makes up the long tail

IMO, it makes a big difference if electronic distribution leads audiences to sample greater volumes of novel/esoteric material, or whether it mostly makes it easier to engage in a kind of electronically mediated nostalgia. Each is a distinct phenomenon and should be split out in your analysis.

For example, if you look at actual music consumption on iPods, you’ll likely find that most people’s “Top 25 Most Played Lists” are filled not with exotic tunes from little known musicians, but with hit recordings from their youth (…this is easy to check: just sample 100 iPod users; or look at the most popular channels on XM or Sirius.)

The same is true of cable channels (or TIVO) where the “greater variety” Mike Ramsey celebrates often (from a ratings standpoint) translates into more viewing of reruns (e.g., hits like Seinfeld) or vintage blockbuster movies; and also time shifting of hit network shows. Moreover, and more intriguing, if you look at many other cable channels – e.g. The History Channel, MTV/VH-1 or Cable News – you see that much of the content is really just sliced & diced archive footage recycled from TV yesteryear. Again, all this is fairly straightforward to quantify.

In any case, IMO it’s crucial to discriminate between whether network distribution really leads to richer diets of new/obscure/exotic niche content, or more time-shifting and/or accelerated recycling of popular tunes, TV shows, movies and archival footage.

Do the analysis, I bet you find it’s mostly the latter (…especially for the majority of consumers.)

This doesn’t mean The Long Tail isn’t a big change. Rather it suggests that electronic abundance is (especially in the case of recorded music and video) altering the nature of consumption. And (as we are just beginning to realize about Google) is a more curious departure from the past than many currently imagine.