The Long Tail

Seth Godin asks: Should human-powered search abandon the Long Tail?

My friend Seth Godin, CEO of human-powered search engine Squidoo, has been reading the press on the search debate between huge range and high quality and wonders if the Long Tail has something to say about it. Along with Squidoo, human-powered search companies include Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, Barnes & Noble's Quamut, the New York Times' About.com, as well as HubPages and many others who are aiming to use a "less is more" approach to competing with Google.

In a sense, they're all proudly leaving the long tail to algorithmic search and seeking success by relentlessly editing down to a human-edited short head. They argue that the search engines reward them for such relentlessly paring down and filtering (they're all at least partly search engine arbitrage plays).  And better search results ought to attract better page creators as well...

Seth's question: does this make sense?

My answer:

I'll answer, as I always do, with slogans half-remembered from Econ 101 ;-)

"Every abundance creates a new scarcity"

For instance:

• An abundance of information can create a scarcity of context
• An abundance of choice can create a scarcity of advice
• An abundance of content can create a scarcity of time
• An abundance of people competing for your attention can create a scarcity of reputational ways to choose among them.

In the old model, distribution bottlenecks made most of those choices for us--we could only watch what was on and buy what was on the shelf. Now, in a Long Tail world, everything gets out there--choice is abundant. This creates an opportunity for new and better filters to navigate that choice (Chapter 7 of my book!), which I would argue describes the examples below. 

How do you compete with the Long Tail? One way is by making the short head more attractive. So when Borders goes from 100,000 books to 80,000 books but turns twice as many of them cover-out on the shelf, they're competing with the Long Tail by making it easier to browse and search and discover new books in a physical setting--doing what a physical store and do best. 

So in short, there's a market for both. As I've said many times, the Long Tail doesn't kill the blockbuster, it just kills the monopoly of the blockbuster. And the same is true in reverse: Google's Long Tail success creates demand for more curated search. One size doesn't fit all.

But if you edit the range of entries down too much, are you really a search company anymore? Or are you just a collection of semi-random pages of human-created content, hoping to be noticed (and rewarded with traffic) by real search companies? If it's the latter, you risk getting it wrong on which pages to focus on, and thus losing out to Google's whole-web agnosticm. If so, you're just like every other web media company, trying to anticipate demand and otherwise stand out in a crowded marketplace. Which is fine. Just don't call it "search".

Follow-Up on a Free Book Experiment

Late last month, Random House's Crown imprint launched its first free book experiment, which quickly became more controversial than the publisher expected.

Crown released Scott Sigler's new book, Infected, online as a free (no DRM) pdf on March 27th, five days before it would be available in stores. The hitch was that this was limited-time deal: on March 31st, the day before the book went on sale in stores, they would take down the file.

This elicited the following rant from Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow:

Publishers are schizophrenic and often end up acting really dumb in the service of trying to do something smart. Crown is putting Scott's book online for free as a PDF, but they're taking it down after only four days -- presumably just in time to kill whatever momentum the downloads are generating. If you happen upon this blog-post next week when it shows up on Digg, you're out of luck -- no download to use to figure out if you want to buy the book.

Worse still: Crown is only making the download available before the book goes on sale! This is an act of massive goofiness. Here's what this means: the book's promotional download period ends before you can buy the book. If you download this book and love it, you can't walk down to the bookstore and pick up a copy. Sure, you can pre-order it on Amazon, but I know from watching my affiliate link payments here on Boing Boing that ten times as many of you buy books that are on sale when I blog them than buy books that have to be pre-ordered. The Internet exists in an eternal NOW, and expecting someone who downloads a book to hold onto the impulse to buy it for four days is so unrealistic, it makes me suspect that this strategy was conceived of by someone who doesn't actually use the Internet.

Either Crown believes that free downloads sell books or they don't. There's no coherent explanation for a ticking-bomb download like this one; it's like the hesitation marks on the wrists of a half-ass suicide.

So which is it? Does Crown believe that free downloads sell books, or don't they?

I talked to Shawn Nicholls, Crown's Online Marketing Manager, to find out.

The short answer is that Crown does indeed believe that free pdfs will sell more physical books. "We definitely subscribe to the believe that offering something online isn't going to take away from sales," says Nicholls. "The one thing I tried to do when we started this was to make a distinction between free music and free books. A MP3 can be a substitute for a CD, but we're not at the place where a pdf is a substitute for a hard book."

But Crown also believes in the concept of artificial scarcity: "Our goal was to create some buzz. Four days of availability gives a sense of urgency and makes it more of an event," he says. And although Crown did take the book down from its official site, Nicholls said that they wouldn't stop people from mirroring it elsewhere for as long as they want.

Here are the initial results of the experiment:

• The book was downloaded 45,000 times over that four days, compared to just 15,000 times for a previous experiment in free ebooks, The Beautiful Children, which was published by Random House in January. (That pdf was posted after the book was on sale.)
• Over the four days, Infected went to #1 on Amazon's Horror List, and #150 overall in book sales (from being in the two thousands before). It's too early to know what the bookstore sales are like, but on the online sales alone, the experiment looks like a success so far.
• The Infected microsite became Crown's top site.

Nicholls suspects that fewer people were inconvenienced by not being able to buy the books in stores over the free pdf window than Doctorow predicts. "The online audience we were hoping to reach is more prone to buying from web retailers, so for them pre-ordering on Amazon four days before publication isn't that frustrating. It shows up just a few days later than it would have if it were purchased after its on-sale date." 

"The way we looked at is that we straddled the line a bit. Giving away the full content of the book at all is a service to the consumer. Cutting it off short was simply us looking at all our long term goals--balancing the marketing buzz of a limited-time event against the virtues of longer availability. However, I can see the logic in Cory's point. It was an experiment, but if we see it as successful, we'd only want to go further, not go back. What we did this time was a calculated trade-off. Next time the conversation might be entirely different."

My take: the important thing is that Crown believes that free digital books can sell more hard copies. Exactly how to do it is a work in progress, but the philosophical hurdle has now been crossed. Now we can expect more and better experiments and less hand-wringing about FREE. Which is quite an advance, any way you look at it.