The Long Tail

Thanks to PaidContent's comprehensive coverage of CSFB's Media Week conference in New York, we've got some sense of how the Long Tail meme is playing in the boardroom.

Dec 6 @ Media Week: Google's Rosenberg Serves The Kool-Aid: The UBS lunch crowd for Jonathan Rosenberg, Google VP-product development is into the hallway, drawn by the strength of a presentation on one of the market's hot stocks. Rosenberg gives a very energetic presentation but I'm not quite sure he reaizes how far away some of the people here are from the tech/web universe. One example: He started to quote "The Long Tail", assumed everyone (probably more fair to say most) had read it and then, as he saw some quizzical responses, urged everyone to do so. He followed that up by referring people to Chris Anderson's blog: "It's a very insightful blog." ... I just want a hands-up show of how many people in this room know what a blog is; many do and some are even our readers. (Hi, Sam.) But this is still a crowd on a learning curve when it comes to the internet. Then again, Google is still on a learning curve when it comes to Wall Street, $400-plus shares aside.

Dec 7 @ Media Week: Creative Answers Needed for A La Carte: When I asked about using Warner's video library on AOL instead of offering it on iTunes at $1.99 a pop, [Time Warner Chairman and CEO Dick] Parsons replied: "How many video iTune (iPod) owners are there? One million maybe? We've got 20 million people who subscribe to AOL and 45 million who use it all the time so you're putting this in front of a hugely larger audience." Then he went for the long tail -- and borrowed my legal pad and pen to illustrate with a graph. Luckily, I had a tape recorder: "Most of the stuff starts over here and ends way, way out here. You monetize this piece of it because that's the 80 percent we can make all the money in. ... Out here (the end) there's 152 people in America who want to see `The Fugitive' again. There not going to go out and buy iPods to see it but if you get it online this enables to monetize the whole thing. There's currently no business model for that in a profitable way so we'll see." He said that strategy doesn't preclude charging for downloads.

Comments

I'm hardly an enthusiast for the way Apple is trying to sell downloadable video, but it still irks me to hear people talking about how the iPod video user base is so tiny. Attention media execs -- those $1.99 episodes of LOST will play on things other than 5G iPods. Dollars to donuts, they'll be playing on TiVos before the end of 2006.

Posted by: Aaron S. Veenstra | December 12, 2005 at 09:08 PM