Hey, Chris Anderson, You’re Still Wrong
The long tail, does not exist and never will exist anywhere except in Chris Anderson’s mind and accompanying carefully selected statistical data. The reality is, unfortunately, lot more like this:
“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.” —From The Economist
[For the record, I write for Wired.com, I met Chris once at the Wired offices and he seemed like a nice guy, so nothing personal. I just happen to think the Long Tail is a crock of shit; both as a business model and as a cultural model.]
