The Long and Short of It
Posted by goodmind on July 16th, 2008
So there’s been some scandal upon the paperback release of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Slate recently ran an article summarizing the major holes in the theory, as identified by Anita Elberse in Harvard Business Review. Elberse certainly backs her case with ample evidence, mostly culled from Australia’s version of Netflix. However, she also makes a shrewd observation about the supply and demand economy of niche markets that’s so self-evident it’s easy to overlook.
Venturing into the Long Tail is not a matter of taste, but rather an issue of capacity. The good news is that niche markets are probably inexhaustive. The bad news is that these most of these markets are too exhausted (lazy) to seek out niche products, in favor of more conspicuous choices.
Elberse uses the example of Australian film buffs on Quickflix, who consistently rented “unpopular” films. It turns out, these sophisticated connoisseurs also rented their fair share of blockbusters too, they just had more “capacity” for watching movies, and therefore had to move on to more obscure films out of sheer necessity.
We wonder what Elberse would say about our capacity for reading blogs, which, like Quickflix/Netflix, are technically subscription based services. Taking a look at our diverse RSS feed begs the question; are we discerning readers, or simply voracious readers?
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