Is the Long Tail full of crap?
HoldingnosehungrywrpOne of the most frequent mistakes people make
about the Long Tail is to assume that things that don't sell well
are "not as good" as things that do sell well. Or, to put it
another way, they assume that the Long Tail is full of crap. After
all, if that album/book/film/whatever were excellent, it would be a
hit, right?
Well, in a word, no. Niches operate by different economics than the
mainstream. And the reason for that helps explain why so much about
Long Tail content is counterintuitive, especially when we're used
to scarcity thinking.
First, let's get one thing straight: the Long Tail is indeed full
of crap. But it's also full of works of refined brilliance and
depth--and an awful lot in between. Exactly the same can be said of
the Web itself. Ten years ago, people complained that there was a
lot of junk on the Internet and, sure enough, any casual surf
quickly confirmed that. Then along came search engines to help pull
some signal from the noise and finally Google, tapping the wisdom
of the crowd itself to turn a mass of incoherence into the closest
thing to an oracle the world has ever seen.
On a store shelf or in any other limited means of distribution, the
ratio of good to bad matters because it's a zero sum game. Space
for one eliminates space for the other. Prominence for one obscures
the other. If there are ten crappy toys for each good one in the
aisle, you'll think poorly of the toy store and be discouraged from
browsing. Likewise it's no fun to flip through bin after bin of CDs
if you haven't heard of any of them.
But where you have unlimited shelf space, it's an infinite sum
game. The billions of crappy web pages about whatever are not a
problem in the way that billions of crappy CDs on the Tower Records
shelves would be. Inventory is "non-rivalrous" and the ratio of
good to bad is simply a signal-to-noise problem, solvable with
information tools.
Which is to say it's not much of a problem at all. You just need
better filters, such as recommendations and good search engines.
The fact that screens 10 and beyond of your Google search results
are unhelpful doesn't matters because screens 1-3 are so useful.
The noise is still out there, but Google allows you to effectively
ignore it. Filters rule!
The following is this expressed graphically. As you go down the
Long Tail the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. Thus the only way
you can maintain a consistently good enough signal to find what you
want is if your filters get increasingly powerful.
Signalnoise_1
This leads to the key to what's different about Long Tails. They're
not pre-filtered by the requirements of distribution bottlenecks
and all that entails (editors, studio execs, A&R guys and
Wal-Mart purchasing managers). As a result their components vary
wildly in quality, just like everything else in the world.
One way to describe this (using the same language of information
theory that brought us signal-to-noise ratios) would be to say that
Long Tails have a "wide dynamic range" of quality: awful to great.
By contrast, the average store shelf has a relatively narrow
dynamic range of quality: mostly average to good (there's some
really great stuff, but much of that is too expensive for the
average retail shelf; niches exist at both ends of the quality
spectrum).
So tails have a wide dynamic range and heads have a narrow dynamic
range. Like this:
Quality
Note that you have high-quality goods in every part of the curve,
from top to bottom. Yes, there are more low-quality goods in the
tail and the average level of quality declines as you go down the
curve. But with good filters averages don't matter. It's all about
the diamonds, not the rough, and diamonds can be found
anywhere.
Before I go on I should say a word about the confusing terms "high
quality" and "low quality". They are, of course, entirely
subjective. Here are some examples of criteria people might use to
value content:
"High quality":
* Addresses my interests
* Well made
* Fresh
* Substantive
* Compelling
"Low quality":
* Not for me
* Badly made
* Stale
* Superficial
* Boring
Note that all of those are entirely in the eye of the beholder;
there are no absolute measures of content quality. One person's
"good" could easily be another's "bad"; indeed, it almost always
is. I like economics papers, but I have friends who like Maxim.
They find my stuff boring; I find their stuff superficial (except
for those Jessica Alba pics).
This is why niches are different. Your noise is my signal. If a
producer intends something to be absolutely right for one audience
it will by definition be wrong for another. The compromises
necessary to make something appeal to everyone mean that it will
almost certainly not appeal perfectly to anyone--that's why they
call it the lowest common denominator.
Is South Park badly made or brilliant? Once upon a time some
network exec had to answer that question for all of us before it
could get distribution. Cable lowered the bar and now Netflix and
the web are lowering it further. In a Long Tail world each of us
answers the quality question for ourselves and the marketplace
sorts it out.
All this leads to three counterintuitive lessons of the Long
Tail.
1. Niche content can be of higher quality than hit content.
2. It doesn't matter how much junk there is around those gems; with
good filters, the average level of quality is irrelevant.
3. You can charge more for high-quality niche content because it is
so well-suited to its audience.
