The Long Tail

Ron Paul as "America's First Long Tail Candidate"

So says Newsweek:.

[The Long Tail] idea is now playing a part in our politics, where Paul's recent rise reflects the same dynamics. In 1988 his libertarian message—reduce government at home, resist military meddling abroad, restore the gold standard—went unheard. Today, it's spreading quickly online and connecting activists across the country, a few people at a time. Paul may still be the longest of long shots. But he's a long shot who can lure 5,000 supporters to his rallies and more than triple his entire '88 war chest in a single $6.6 million day. That's a whole new level of high-passion, low-polling politics—and in a long-tail world, others are bound to follow. "Ron Paul is the harbinger," says Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine Reason. "Just as the major entertainment companies are producing far more varied and individualized fare, I think we're going to see more and more political candidates who are more interesting in and of themselves but deliver smaller and smaller numbers."

Over the decades, Americans have become increasingly unhappy about having to cram themselves into one of two "big box" parties. Seven of the last 10 elections were won with less than 51 percent of the vote; in three of the last four, no candidate won a majority. Today, two thirds of U.S. adults (and a full three quarters of 18- to 30-year olds) say they would consider voting for an independent candidate in the next election. The rise of Howard Dean (another anti-establishment Web phenom) and the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis mirrored this breakdown of consensus; 2008's fragmented Republican field is further proof. "The long tail is not the political center," economist Arnold Kling has said. "It is not a third party waiting to form. It is not a coalition. It is not a 'silent majority' of either the right or left. It is simply every variety of political belief that does not fit within the two major parties." As the Web allows niche voters to form communities, raise money and get heard, it's inevitable that the major-party machines will clash with—and ultimately accommodate—the individualized constituencies they're struggling to serve.

The whole thing is interesting and worth a read. I try to avoid politics myself and really don't know much about Paul, but I get asked about the Long Tail of politics a lot. It's good to see that Newsweek seems to have come to the same conclusions about the increasing dissatisfaction with two "big box" parties that I've been seeing.

[illustration from Newsweek article]

Kevin Kelly's Free Book Experiment

Every year or so my friend Kevin Kelly releases an updated version of his book-length True Films guide to the best documentaries. He's done it in print (through Lulu and Amazon) and he's done it as a cheap ebook download from the True Films site.

This year he's doing something new. He's released the book as a special pdf that, when read with Adobe Acrobat 8, shows ads on the side. He explains:

These ads are inserted into the PDF by Adobe (using the Yahoo ad network) when you open the file. Like Google Adsense ads, they are contextual. That is, Adobe/Yahoo tries to match the content of the ads with the content of text on the the pages, in my case, text about documentaries. The ads I see at this moment of writing are mostly about apartment rentals, but they change each time one opens the book. The way Adobe/Yahoo "knows" about the content of the PDF is not by crawling the web, but by the author (me in this case) submitting the PDF to their machine the first time, which then stamps it with a registration code, so it can remember what's in it when someone far away opens it on their machine.

Like Google, no money flows unless someone clicks on them. If a reader of the True Films PDF books clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays Yahoo, who in turns gives me some small percent, around 5 cents (I think).

But because the PDF file must reach out from your computer to the Adobe server to get the ads, an action that some readers may not approve, seeing the ads is an opt-in default. You have to agree to see the ads before any will show up. You will also need the latest version of Acrobat Reader (8) to see them. If you use an older version no ads will show up, and you'll see only the free book. Since the ads are adjacent to the book, whether you see ads or not will not affect the design of the book itself.

I'm delighted that he's exploring new models, but I doubt this one will make much money. First, Yahoo's contextual matching stinks, or something's gone wrong with it this time, since the ads were all for apartments when I looked. Even if they did get the context right, five cents a click isn't much when you think that only one in a hundred readers will click on an ad, and most people don't have Acrobat 8 yet and won't even see the ads in the first place. But money wasn't why Kevin wrote the book, and I suspect he's more interested in the experiment than the revenues.

As for the book itself, it's a delight and an essential accompaniment to a Netflix subscription. The only improvement I'd like to see is a table of contents. Both website and book are a bit hard to navigate, unless you're looking for the serendipity of a scroll from top to bottom. If you love documentaries, or just want to dip your toe into them guided by an expert, start here.

Jessica Simpson: a new box office low!

Chris Thilk writes in with news from the former blockbuster industry:

"I remember in The Long Tail you talk about a movie (I don't remember which one) [ed: it was The Dark Hours] that set the lowest box office record, so I thought you'd be interested in this:

"Jessica Simpson may also have set a record at the box office. Her latest film, Blonde Ambition, co-starring Luke Wilson, took in just $1,190 over the weekend. True, it was shown in only eight Texas theaters, but that's still an average of less than $50 per theater per day, meaning about six people showed up to see it in each location each day. On his TV Guide Online blog, film critic Ken Fox asked, "Doesn't someone like Jessica Simpson have more than 48 friends? What about that big Texas family of hers? ... Just how bad is this thing anyway?"

BTW, total US box office grosses this year will be about $9.4 billion, up 4.5% on last year, but still below 2003 and 2004 in inflation adjusted dollars. Total tickets sold will also trail 2003 and 2004 by 4.5% and 3.5% respectively.

Are dead-tree magazines good or bad for the climate?

Companies are increasingly being asked to calculate their carbon footprint, and if they're public, publish it. Good idea? Perhaps. But it's harder than you might think, and the results can sometimes be counterintuitive. Take my own industry, magazine publishing. Surely dead-tree media is bad for the climate, and web media is good, right? Well, not necessarily.

Let's look at the total carbon cycle. The thing we're trying to do when combating climate change is to decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere (ie, have a net carbon-negative process). This is what happens with magazine publishing:

1. Trees take carbon out the air. Carbon negative
2. Sustainable forestry companies (the only kind we use) cut down those trees, and plant an equal number to replace them (trees absorb the most carbon in the young, high-growth period of their life. Update: see comments for more on this). Carbon neutral
3. The cut trees are turned into pulp and then paper in a decarbonized process. Mills are generally on rivers and the pulp process is driven by hydro-generated electric power. Additional power is generated by burning bark, and the carbon from that is usually captured and sequestered. Carbon neutral
4. We print and bind that paper into magazines, which are delivered mostly by the US Postal Service, which runs the same routes whether they're carrying our magazines or not. Since the printing plants tend to be away from urban areas and near rail distribution, they tend to be pretty efficient from an energy perspective.  Slight carbon positive
5. Subscribers read (relish!) the magazines, and then throw them out. Since our readers tend to be upper middle-class urban and suburban dwellers, they're almost certainly either recycling the paper or it's being properly landfilled. In either case, the carbon is sequestered, which is to say it doesn't get back in the atmosphere. Carbon neutral

Now compare that with our website. The carbon cost of creating content is the same as the magazine (people in a building with computers and lights on), and the carbon cost of running our webservers 24/7, plus the carbon cost of more than 100 million minutes of time a month on all of the computers used to read those pages, along with their share of the Internet infrastructure in-between, is at least as much as the cost of running the magazine's printing plants once a month. But the big difference is that we lose step #1 above: although it generates no more or less carbon than magazine publishing, web publishing takes no carbon out of the atmosphere.

So by this analysis dead-tree magazines have a smaller net carbon footprint than web media. We cut down trees and put them in the ground. From a climate change perspective, this is a good thing.

And what about magazines printed on recycled paper? Well, putting aside the inconvenient truth that there isn't enough recycled paper to go around and that it's ruinously expensive for large-circulation titles such as ours, it has the same problem as the website. It doesn't take any new carbon out of the atmosphere--there's no net sequestration.

Now if you'd asked me to actually put a number in front of each of these directional arrows--say how much better print is than the web from a carbon perspective--I couldn't do it. It involves too many third parties, from our printing presses to the recycling or landfilling practices of all of our subscribers. But I think the basic conclusion about which is most climate-friendly is right. Surprised?

[UPDATE: Joost in the comments points us to this excellent paper from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, which puts hard numbers on much of the above. It compared printed newspapers to people reading those newspapers on the web, and concluded that for the same time reading (30 minutes) the printed newspaper has a lower carbon footprint. Our magazine scenerio is even more favorable than that, since in the Swedish report they assumed that the paper would all be recycled (ie, they don't capture new carbon, the way we do with virgin pulp) and since they're newspapers, they have to do their own daily distribution at significant carbon cost, while we ride along with normal postal delivery.]

Year-end Status Report: failed to watch any TV once again, but otherwise kinda freakishly good

I've had crappy years and I've had good ones. 2007 was one of the latter, despite the fact that I once again seem to have flunked my cultural literacy test by being oblivious to anything involving sports, politics, pop music or TV (there's a show called "Ugly Betty"? Who knew.) What can I say? I've been busy. Here's how the past twelve months went and how the next twelve look:

• The Long Tail: Won the Loeb Award for business book of the year, I got included in the Time 100, and the hardcover kept selling. Coming in June: the paperback edition ("The Longer Tail"), with two new chapters (including the one most requested--Long Tail Marketing) and a bunch of updated stuff. I did more than 250,000 miles of traveling for speeches this year, which was both gratifying and also too much. Next year: less, while I work on...
• FREE: My second book is scheduled for Q1 2009, but you'll see elements of it coming out in different forms earlier than that. I've started giving speeches about it, including this one at Nokia that has been getting some attention. This blog will shift towards FREE over the next month as I start cranking on the writing.
• Wired: A great year. Won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, and set records for circulation, revenues, newsstand sales and web traffic.
• Family: Expecting the fifth kid in a week or so and the oldest is still just ten. Very, very noisy, but also very, very fun. I'm figuring that at least one of these kids is going to want to build robots with me, right? Speaking of which...
• DIY Drones: This site, which I set up on the Ning social networking platform, was the beast that ate my weekends and nights this year. Not so much the site itself, but the huge amount of programming and hardware hacking necessary to build five working UAVs from scratch. It's been nearly twenty years since I was last a real programmer, and it shows. Fortunately a lot of people were there to help me, and so DIY Drones emerged as a way to return the favor. We showed up everywhere from PBS to the Economist and Make Magazine to, er, the police blotter.
• BookTour: A good start, but we haven't set the world afire yet. We launched the site in July and have been building to a critical mass of book events and users since then. We've learned a lot about the fragmented and low-tech world of the book industry, which we're doing our part to help, and heard from a load of authors about their frustrations in marketing books in an age when publishers do little more than print and distribute. Towards the end of the year, we decided to switch strategies and embrace a distributed model on social networks. We'll see the fruits of that in the new year.
• GeekDad: This became an official Wired blog this year, which meant that it was no longer something I could do from airports in-between flights. So I handed over the reins to Ken Denmead, a civil engineer who volunteered to blog for the site and then blew me away with his energy, organizational skills and hardcore geekdaddery. So now he runs the site day to day and I mostly just read, admire and wish I had more time to do all that cool stuff with my kids. 

China: the future of free?

A few weeks ago I was in Brazil, reporting on a market where music and film piracy has tipped from an evil to be fought to a marketing channel to be exploited. This week, after more crazy traveling, I was in China, which is an even better example of that phenomena. The Chinese music industry is at the cutting edge of finding ways to make money in every way other than the sale of songs, since the traditional process of selling music as a product (certainly CDs) is considered pretty much of a lost cause.

We held a small salon in Beijing, hosted by the Music2.0 group, to share examples and case studies of how a new music industry is reforming from the ashes of the old one. Before I get into those new models, a few facts about music in China today:

• Virtually the only sale of music is via the booming ringtone and ringback market, which generated an amazing $1.5 billion in revenues for China Mobile alone this year. The only problem with that is the artists and labels see very little of the money, since most of it is counted as a "service fee" for China Mobile.
• The other big winner in digital music is Baidu, the search engine that has bested Google (so far) in China.  Because about half of the 170 million people who are online in China get their access through shared terminals (cyber cafes and the like), they tend to get their music through search and MP3 file archives, rather than peer-to-peer file sharing  And Baidu is the place to go for music search (indeed, it's rumored that many of the underground music archives are actually hosted on Baidu servers). It makes its money from advertising. Nothing goes to the artists or labels.
• There is very little Long Tail effect in Chinese music. For starters, there are only an estimated 150,000 Chinese-language (Mandarin or Cantonese) songs available in digital form (compared to more than 10 million in the West). The notion of genres is still very primitive. Many music sites segment music only by country of origin and gender ("Taiwan: Male; Taiwan: Female"), and even those that do take a stab at genre don't go much further than Wal-Mart ("rock", "folk", etc)
• The indie music scene is also very small. Aside from a few festivals, there aren't many venues where you can hear original live music, and in Shanghai, the cultural hot spot of the country, the club scene is focused on DJs.
• It's easy to exaggerate the touring opportunity in China. Linkin Park famously came and played shows for 25,000 people, grossing $750,000 in total, but that was something of an exception. Faithless came at around the same time and played to quarter-full houses.

So how do Chinese musicians make money? Aside from the few who get a small cut of the ringtone sales, it's mostly in corporate and promotional appearances (like the popstar shown in my iPhone snap above, whose name I didn't catch--help anyone?--when she sang at the China Mobile conference in Guangzhou on Monday), a few concerts, some endorsements for ads and other licensing of their face (if they're good looking), and that old standby, the Day Job.

Nothing terribly lucrative there, but that's not too surprising: China represents rock bottom for the music industry, especially on the economics of the creative side. The CD business has evaporated, and the businesses that have risen it its wake don't help artists. Yet China Mobile and Baidu are making something like $2 billion a year indirectly from music, so there's clearly a business in there somewhere. It just doesn't extend to many musicians at the moment.

Nevertheless, people are experimenting with new models to change that, not by fighting piracy but by building businesses around free music. Among the smart people who are innovating in new music models, from sponsored music sites for up-and-coming bands to aggregators that are much more music-centric than the generic Baidu, is Ed Peto. This British former A&R guy, now based in Beijing, has written the best piece on the future of the Chinese music industry in an age of free that I've seen. If you're interested in this subject, stop reading this post and start reading his impressive Register opus. He knows of what he speaks.

Valleywag math

Noted without comment, a screenshot from the RSS feeds I'm just catching up on:

In fairness, Valleywag's editor seems sufficiently chagrined to have readers correcting their math. [disclosure: many, many conflicts]

Q: what's The worst thing you can do with an iphone?

A: Simply leave it on in your pocket when you leave the country.

I've just got back from ten days abroad (from Amsterdam to Israel to several cities in China) and while I was in China AT&T cut off my phone service. Why? Because I'd run up a $2,100 bill.

And how did that happen, when I hardly used the phone at all? Because the iPhone's email app keeps automatically fetching email every fifteen minutes even when it's roaming abroad. I know I am the last person on the planet to discover this, and I'm sure that it's my fault because at some point in the past I must have gotten annoyed by the roaming data warning and turned Data Roaming on, but the way AT&T handled this mistake is insane.

At around $2,000 (I didn't know the amount at the time) they sent me a text message saying only that my "international data use is high" and that I should call a US number (at $2/minute) to "prevent a costly bill". Needless to say, I had no idea what "high" meant, and I wasn't inclined to incur a huge voice bill from China for the privilege of hanging on hold with customer service for the usual 20 minutes simply to find out what this text message meant.

And the next day they shut off my phone and froze my account. To their credit, they have since offered to retroactively put me on an international data roaming plan that would cut the bill to $300 or so, but because I didn't call customer service from China when I got that message, they're having trouble putting this through. So for now, the bill stands.

Needless to say, AT&T could have easily avoided screwing me like this. For instance, they could have:

• Sent the text message earlier, at, say, $200, rather than $2,000.
• Actually written the text message so it was helpful. Customer service told me they couldn't send the horrifying dollar amount "for privacy reasons", but surely a tip like "iPhone users: turn off Data Roaming by going to Settings/General/Network" would have given me something I could actually use.
• Given me the option/suggestion to subscribe to the International Data Roaming package right there in the text message. Or if it had to be done by phone, at least let me know why I should be calling.
• Found a more graceful way to halt my spending without stranding me with a totally dead phone. Surely they could have turned off data without turning off voice, or even left me with text messaging as a lifeline.

Now I have another hour or two on the phone with customer services to look forward to as we try to sort this out. Whatever AT&T made from me in roaming charges, they're going to lose in customer support costs. To say nothing of my good will.

How can AT&T be smart enough to offer a revolutionary device like the iPhone, which is all about delightful user experience, and yet let their own customer communications be a chilling reminder how little phone companies care about their users? There, in a nutshell, is the case for the unlocked iPhone.