Book Review & Discussion : The Long Tail

In this event, you’ll learn

What pre- and post-filters are and how they help customers access your products
The problem with shelf space
How Netflix can be responsible for 50% of all documentary film revenue in the United States
Why even “offline” companies like LEGO can use the long tail to their advantage
Which concrete steps to take to implement the long tail into your business
What you can learn from Microsoft’s Channel 9 blog about long tail advertising

About the Author

I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and the author of "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More", "FREE: The Future of a Radical Price" and "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution".

I live in Berkeley, CA, with my wife and five children.

In my spare time, I have a hobby-gone-wrong in the form of an aerial robotics community at DIY Drones and 3D Robotics, a company I co-founded that makes aerial robotic technolgy. We develop open source autopilots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which some people find thrilling and others find worrying.

Overview

Since everyone can now produce their own content, the tail keeps getting longer.
The moment you leave the store with a new laptop in your hands, you are a creator. You then own a music production studio, a typewriter, a professional video editing system and a megaphone to speak to the world, all in one.

Because the means of production are now available to everyone, the tail has completely exploded in length, and it keeps getting longer.

Every day people create more and more things online. I’ve been up for five hours today, in which two million (!) blog posts have been published already. Within the next 24 hours, six million videos will be uploaded to Youtube, 500 million tweets sent on Twitter and 60 million photos uploaded to Instagram.

Because producing content has become so cheap, the barrier for people to do it is really low, which makes the tail longer and longer with every second.

Okay, so there is a long tail of niche products, but in order for those to be profitable, the tail has to also be fat, i.e. all of these products have to sell. To sell something, it first has to be accessible to those, who’d like to buy it. And this is where what Chris Anderson calls aggregators come in.