Visualizing the rise of the Long Tail

In an article on "deportalization" (a theme I've been banging on for in my media speeches a while) Keith Teare offers a neat analogy for the shift from a few hits to many non-hits. He's referring to websites, but the same could be true for almost any products. 

Then:

Now:

Soon:

(Special note to Richard Florida: think of this when you're considering whether the world is becoming less "spiky", not more)

Comments

[César]

I think that you can't really talk about 'flattening'. It's more about a 'fractalization' of the environment, I believe, where you have a behaviour that replicates at different levels and you can't really tell the big picture from the detail one...

[Barry Ritholtz]

Its an inevitable shift in how we communicate with each other, enabled by technology. We've gone from Few-to-Many (TV Networks) to More-to-Many (Cable channels, Portals) to Many-to-Many (Blogs, You Tube).

Its there reason why Google is still growing while Yahoo has stabilized: We are moving towards an era where the terms Content Producer and Content Consumer are either interchangeable, if not meaningless alltogether . . .

[Mark Harrison]

You have a link here to your response to the Richard Florida piece in which you argue that the world is NOT getting more spikey, claiming that the ubiquity of broadband makes geograhpy less important.

Two days later, you posted (in part 2 of your article about radical transparency), a mention of reddit as an exemplar of a radically transparent company.

ISTR, reddit was funded early on by Y Combinator.

From Y Combinator's website:

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Will you fund startups in more cities in the future?

Maybe. But frankly we would not be doing startups a favor by encouraging them to locate in places other than Silicon Valley and Boston.
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If you'll pardon the pun, I think I'm moving to Florida on this one :-)

[Paul Dubiansky]

I'd imagine we've all heard by now about Forrester Research's recent report on declining iTunes sales. The story at

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-6143555.html

contains the following:

"To understand the numbers further, Bernoff (commenters note: report author Josh Bernoff) notes that of the 181 households (commenter's note: households in the sample), one-third of those households accounts for 80 percent of all iTunes revenue. Most businesses naturally follow the famous "80/20" rule, in which 80 percent of a company's revenue comes from the top 20 percent of its customers. But in Apple's case, this means that there are relatively few heavy users of iTunes and lots of infrequent or occasional users, Bernoff said. Thirty-two percent of the 181 households only bought one song from iTunes last year, and just 31 percent bought six or more songs."

Any comments on how this fits with the Long Tail idea?

[Deodokkk]

I'd imagine we've all heard by now about Forrester Research's recent report on declining iTunes sales.

[online auctions]

It is somewhat true that there will less and less "hits" with highly popular brands or websites. But, we can expect every once-in-a-while a breakthrough by some commodities and website, only because people are "hungry" for getting the new things.

[Anonymous]

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