Wired's Long Tail web strategy: the "Three Cs"

One of the questions I get most often is how I apply the Long Tail strategy to my day job of running Wired.

(Actually, the question I get most often is how I can work for a blockbuster company, Conde Nast, by day and celebrate the decline of the blockbuster by night. My physics-geek answer: it isn't hypocrisy, it's wave-particle duality!)

The short answer is what I call the "Three Cs": Catalyze and Curate Conversations.

Wired, as a mass market magazine (paid circ of around 675,000 and an estimated 2 million readers per month) is unavoidably a one-size-fits-all product. To be sure, that "all" as in "all people who are interested in how technology is changing the world" but in an era where nearly everyone in the Google generation has broadband, an iPod and a cellphone, that's pretty mass.

So in the magazine, with limited pages and a huge general-interest readership, we remain in the blockbuster business. Thus Transformers and Martha Stewart (albeit with a Wii cake) covers.

On the web, however, we have "unlimited shelf space" (an infinite number of pages, which can be created at close to no cost), so that's where we focus on the niche as well as the mass. We have room for geeky blogs on hacker subculture and Lego. Obsessive drill-downs. And for loads of user-generated content (best shown in the form of our Reddit news aggregation and voting site).

As we roll out new features over the next year, you'll see the ratio of conversational catalysis to traditional journalism climb. Not to say we'll do less traditional journalism. We're just going to be starting and curating a lot more user-driven conversations. Our new How To wiki is just one example.

Some of these experiments aren't going to work. That's fine--"fail fast" is as good a motto as any for online media. Indeed, we were just honored by the Knight-Batten awards  for our Assignment Zero experiment in crowdsourcing journalism, which was highlighted as "an excellent example of learning from failure." 

Here's a question: how should you reward failure? And how can you tell the difference between failure that came from commendable risk-taking and failure that came from sloppy execution? 

Comments

[Mary]

Failure is its own reward. If you fail and learn something from it and get back on the horse, that's a good failure. If you refuse to learn from it and don't get back on the horse, that's bad failure, which is apathy. You've answered your own question about telling the difference between commendable risk-taking failure and sloppy failure. Sloppy failure is, well, sloppy. The person involved with sloppy failure may not be able to tell, but other people sure can.

[Colin Henderson]

Chris ... this is a brilliant example of someone who just gets it, and my thought is, just to keep thinking the way you think, and doing what you do.
PS ... is Catalyze a real word :-)

[Christopher Mims]

Well, if you ever want to have a very in-depth conversation about why Assignment Zero failed, you've got my digits. As someone who followed it fairly closely, and who knows one of its editors pretty well, here's the short version:

1. Insufficient automation. Unlike Oh My News (a site whose success I have been baffled to see not reproduced in the U.S.) Assignment Zero was *heavily* reliant on old fashioned human and e-mail powered editing. The result was a project that was hardly supplemented at all by the things the web does best -- collaborative filtering and, ironically, crowdsourcing. Imagine if you were the editor who had to handle the front page WSJ rupert-acquires-the-WSJ story that was recently gang-tackled by 6 reporters--it would be harder to integrate all their input than to simply work with a single writer, no? That was the position your Assignment Zero editors were in.

2. The solution would have been to hire fewer editors and more coders. As it is, the WIRED editor who handled the project said himself that he was lucky that editor Dave Cohn happened to have the skills to re-jigger some parts of the Drupal back-end that Assignment Zero was dependent on. Technology is not a core competency of most media companies... that's why, ahem, WIRED had to *acquire* Reddit.

3. As for identifying 'good' vs. 'useless' failures... I can't imagine a reliable algorithm for that... other than making sure that you're always empowering your most talented and passionate people. In my experience the only failures that are truly useless are those that were pre-ordained by corporatism, careerism and red tape. (c.f. NBC's "youtube killer", Bud.tv, etc.)

[Chris Anderson]

Christopher,

Great comment and feedback. I think I agree with everything you've said. Wish you'd been here to help in real-time!

Chris

[Amy Gahran]

Personally, what I've learned about both success and failure is that a single example of either is never enough to prove or disprove any model or theory.

Case in point: In the Poynter Institute's blog E-Media Tidbits, which I edit, I've been trying to educate journalists about several aspects of online media. One of the most controversial topics there is wikis. Traditional journalists often are STILL extremely wary of applying wikis to their work (either on the research or publishing side) because of the notorious LA Times wikitorial disaster -- now years in the past. I keep having to remind them that forming such a broad opinion about the value and nature of wikis based on a single poorly planned and executed project represents poor journalistic judgment. I think I'm finally starting to make some headway on that.

- Amy Gahran

[cliff]

It is great to see the fresh thinking coming from this blog (and out of CondeNast!) - CH

[zenpundit]

"Curate" ?

Forgive my ignorance Chris,but I'm not sure how you are using this word, which to me, vaguely denotes a vicar making the rounds of the parish on his bicycle.

As to your question, failure that points the way to success should be rewarded. Inaction should be penalized.

[Chris Anderson]

Zen,

You don't know what "curate" means? Like curate an art gallery exhibition? It means to select and guide. I think that's pretty common usage, no?

Chris

[red1]

WIRED and its resources carries so much gems. Even failures in there shall be taken apart and sold as crystals.

Just to say, Keep it humming with those Cs, they do add up to that final C - Carma.

[Eben Carlson]

"My physics-geek answer: it isn't hypocrisy, it's wave-particle duality!"

Quantum physics insisted that the universe was collapsing.

Hubble proved conclusively that the universe was expanding--and doing so at an ever increasing rate.

If you're basing your assumptions on hundred-years old science, why should we consider your conclusions growth?

The corporate blockbuster is failing, and the personal, or intimate, blockbuster is on the rise. That's true.

But it's not that they'll exist in some sort of relativistic muddle for the rest of time--quantum physics isn't the final answer but a 100 year gut check.

Even Einstein knew the answer was unification--he just didn't know how, when or why.

What the long tail doesn't take into account is frozen content prices.

Which will have to be thawed before much more significant growth can happen.

Allowed to float.

And once they do, all the money will be in faces, not tails.

Or--in beauty, not ass.

Fixed prices favor quantity--that's socialism. Floating prices favor quality--that's capitalism.

But fixed prices retard growth.

And fixed content prices retard cultural growth.

And content is all we're creating these days--with all our manufacturing and management processes relatively standardized.

Put it this way: the history of the world economy--like the nature of the universe--not only favors growth but demands it.

And now that they only thing that can grow is content--the only serious money will be in faces.

Even though the fixed prices on content make it appear that the only growth, or money, is in longer tails.

Or, put it this way: what would you rather do--crunch numbers via computer 50 hours a week or be an artist?

That's what's happening.

It appears that the numbers guys (the hedge funders) are winning. But they're the last Emperors. Long tailers and supercrunchers would then be the tailors who insist they're wearing clothes.

[Doug]

I only buy sporadically now, though I read probably every editorial word of Wired's first 10 years. Martha on the cover (Wii or no Wii) was the first cover that completely dissuaded me from buying the magazine. (And that includes the very regrettable "electric hand" for the first cover story on push media.)

I live in Germany, and have for a number of years, and international subscriptions for US magazines are terrible, terrible, terrible. It would most likely be cheaper for me to take out a subscription at a Stateside address and get someone to mail it to me than it would be to pay for an international subscription directly. (If this were a deliberate policy, would you be able to say so on the web?) Also, I presume that the move to Conde Nast made this situation better, but my domestic subscription in ca. 95/96 was plagued by slow start, random updates and non-delivery. Once bitten, still shy.

Halo3 cover looks interesting. And Switch, needless to say, will not grace these shores for some weeks to come. Oct 15-20 most likely.

[js]

I don't know if you'd ever see this comment, but I'm really curious if, 2 years later, you still consider Reddit a good purchase in light of front page discussion threads like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/8h1x8/aipac_mission_accomplished_us_to_drop_spy_case/

(Plenty more popular Reddit comments in this style here: http://www.reddit.com/r/RacistReddit/ )

[kabin]

thanks...
Kabin
Konteyner