Author: Tom Slee

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 12 – The Infinite Screen. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

Should we give Chris Anderson a break when it comes to Google Video?

The second sentence of Chapter 12 is "On January 19, 2006, Google unveiled Google Video, the ultimate Long Tail marketplace of the moving image" [193]. Of course, Google Video has been what us pre-digital folks call a "total bust" and YouTube (which doesn’t get a mention in the book) is everywhere – so much so that Google bought it.

Well, in January 2007 Chris Anderson admitted that he got it wrong:

This is not to say that there aren’t many things I don’t cover in the book but should have, and a few things I did cover but shouldn’t have *cough* Google Video *cough*.

So yes, let’s give him a break. I mean, who knew? Not me. So let’s put it on record that I’m giving him a free pass on this one.

But back to the point. Chapter 12 argues that TV is facing a Long Tail challenge from Internet video, and it starts off by charting the rise of Internet video with a comparison:

MSNBC’s The Abrams Report, with a multimillion-dollar budget and a crew of dozens was at the time of this writing watched by an average of 215,000 homes per day. Rocketboom, a Jon Stewart-like comedy news program created online by exactly two people for the cost of some videotapes, two lights, and a cardboard map, was watched by 200,000 homes per day over the same period. Now it’s selling advertising and got $40,000 for the five thirty-second spots in its first week. Not quite as high as broadcast TV revenues, perhaps, but the networks would kill for those margins.
…A generation that grew up online and developed its media consumption habits in the bandwidth paradise of American university dorm rooms is now totally comfortable watching video on a computer screen. [193]

Rocketboom may be a comedy news program (5 minutes per day) but let’s just note it isn’t news. There is no investigation going on, just some messing around with a camera, and studio comedy is pretty cheap no matter how you do it (that’s why the cable channels had all those stand-ups on until they discovered reality TV – comedians come cheap). So the financial comparison is a bit apples and oranges.

But the big thing here is to ask where the Rocketboom numbers come from. We’ve seen that Chris Anderson is relentlessly optimistic in his view of internet technologies, and he lets that attitude get in the way of his objectivity here. Those first-week ads were something of a publicity stunt, bein auctioned on eBay according the the MIT Advertising Lab. A recent posting by the same MIT Advertising Lab shows that the story is different now:

Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank. Advertising is not doing it. "It’s frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now," said the daily video blog’s founder, Andrew Baron. "Even though we have a relatively large audience, advertisers are just not happy to do ‘small deals,’ he explained in an interview. Baron says there are 200,000 downloads of Rocketboom shows, seven days a week. ‘They say they want to blast their commercials to millions of people.’ So, Rocketboom is again toying with the idea of charging for content. (MarketWatch)

Andrew Baron last summer: "Or maybe in the future we will decide to take a hit and not run ads some days because we could afford to."

Wonder what happened to the Rocketboom being shown on TiVo.

The rule, which Mr. Anderson knows full well, is that you don’t believe what people say about themselves, especially when they’re trying to sell something. Let’s take a closer look at some claims about the commercials and the viewership.

In October 2006 "Baron said he’s just done a deal worth $80,000 for a week of commercials in his videoblog.  Claiming a daily audience of some 300,000 people, Baron could be getting more than a $55 CPM for his ads.    You could get a discount, though. He’ll sell you a week of spots for $60,000 – if he likes the commercial content." 

Another commentator, Ze Frank, has challenged the Rocketboom numbers, noting some inconsistency in the figures Baron has reported over time:

  "Rocketboom is watched by 350,000 people a day."
April 21, 2006: Rolling Stone magazine (link)

  "[Rocketboom’s] audience is up about 100,000 the last month, to about 400,000 a day."
August 10, 2006: Dow Jones MarketWatch (link) 

  Q: "Since Amanda left, have you seen any change in the audience?"
A: "It’s grown a bit."
October 11, 2006: Future of PR Conference (link) 

  "…over 300,000 downloads per day."
October 24, 2006 blog post (link)

Businessweek’s Heather Green has chimed in too, suggesting that the October figure of "over 300,000 downloads" was an overestimate by about 50%. And how downloads translates into viewers is another issue entirely – does everyone watch to the end of the show, or do they drop it when a friend signs on to MSN? The picture – presented so breezily by Chris Anderson – is complex and obscure, and probably not nearly as dramatic as he makes it look.

The same problem appears elsewhere in Internet advertising-driven sites. There has been controversy over Second Life’s claims, nicely summarized by The Register’s Shaun Rudolph. There have been complaints about how difficult it is to cancel accounts created on a speculative whim at numerous sites – those account numbers translate into potential advertising money. And the effectiveness of web advertising itself is open to debate, with some serious estimates of "click fraud" being around 15% of all clicks – which translates into about $1 billion over charged to advertisers.

So – don’t trust self-reported numbers, especially if they support your thesis. Now on with the rest of the chapter.

A Tail for the Taking [194-196] sets out the reason why Anderson sees TV as vulnerable to alternatives – there’s a lot of content, most of it not available to us for purely technological reasons, so "the ratio of produced content to available content is higher than in any other industry" [196]. It’s a good point, and to his credit he goes on to point out one of the problems – it’s not the technology, it’s the issue of rights, which is a rat’s nest. It’s easy to think that the Internet is doing away with old-fashioned laws – and it does challenge many – but let’s remember that Napster (the real Napster, that is) got beaten by the law. It’s not impotent yet.

TV Outside the Box [196-197] suggests that new material on the Internet could more effectively challenge TV because the rights issues associated with old content are not so problematic.  The section has a brief description of one such effort: Barrio305 – a web-only TV service for "urban Latin culture" [197] that each day "streams about 50,000 minutes of video to 5,000 unique users" [197] built on the Brightcove video distribution platform. It’s an interesting story, but just a hint of one of many possible futures. Nothing definitive yet, that’s for sure. And where do those figures come from? The book has no indication, in endnotes or anywhere else. In a recent interview the owners claim "about 10,000 viewers" daily. Who knows?

Shorter, Faster, Smaller [198-199] continues the argument in a small way. It points out that videos on the web are much smaller than TV shows" about 3 minutes instead of 30. Anderson thinks that the "arbitrary middle [of 30 minute shows] will not hold" [199]. So this is a nice setup for an argument. So now can we see some data…

Hollywood @ Home [199-200] No we can’t. The chapter switches to "The other form of video that will be transformed in a Long Tail world is movies". We’re done with TV apparently – like a 3 minute video the story was over before it got started. Is TV going to change? Sure. Will it go "Long Tail"? Who knows?

One other point about this chapter. Given that Internet video is a different beast from TV – as he says here – maybe the comparison of TV to Internet video is not quite the right one when it comes to describing a change in culture. They both come at us through a screen, but if they are different things then the behaviour trend is not simply TV -> Internet video. There is also Books -> Internet video, and TV -> video games (a "Short Head" form of entertainment), and so on.

In looking at the way things change we have to forget the screen. It’s natural to think of things that come through monitors as being kind of like things that come through TV screens, but there are other ways to think. MySpace and Facebook, for example, are more about conversation than media. And if we want to call these forms of activity "Long Tail" then let’s remember that the phone companies could be called the ultimate Long Tail business – capturing big company phone bills but making most of their money off those millions of little individual conversations ("verbal production?") and making money off them because there are so many. There’s nothing new about providing a service to many people and making money off them. Oil companies make a lot of money selling to hundreds of millions of individual car owners.

As for movies, as Anderson points out, the way we watch them has expanded from movie theatres to TV, rented DVDs, and now downloaded movies onto hard drives, which will surely become more common in the next two or three years. With each expansion, the nature of the business changes. For Anderson, the complex development is a simple story:

What the VCR and the video rental store hinted at was the rise of the age of infinite choice. Those stores increased the available selection of movies of any given Saturday night a hundredfold. Today, Netflix increases it a thousandfold. The Internet will increase it a gazillionfold.
Every time a new technology enables more choice, whether it’s the VCR or the Internet, consumers clamor for it. Choice is simply what we want and, apparently, what we’ve always wanted.

gazillionfold???

This big conclusion is speculation balanced on top of some very frail data in this chapter. As for whether choice is really "what we want and, apparently, what we’ve always wanted", well someone could write a book about that.

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the second half of Chapter 11 – Living in a Niche Culture. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

The Rise of Massively Parallel Culture [182-185] reveals yet another of Chris Anderson’s weaknesses: as Editor of Wired Magazine in San Francisco he is surrounded by "geek friends" [182].

The Long Tail worldview is digital-optimist-libertarian, is characteristic of Silicon Valley – a culture called Cyberselfish in the book of the same name by Wired contributor Pauline Borsook. As The New York Times summarizes:

Ms. Borsook contends that many of the favorite arguments of technolibertarians come from ”bionomics” — that is, they like to use metaphors drawn from biology to explain economic behavior and endorse a decentralized free-market system. Reduced to a bumper slogan, Ms. Borsook writes, bionomics states that ”the economy is a rain forest”; in other words, it suggests that ”no one can manage or engineer a rain forest, and rain forests are happiest when they are left alone to evolve, which will then benefit all the happy monkeys, pretty butterflies and funny tapirs that live in them.”

Cyberselfish is a few years old now (but a good read nonetheless), and bionomics is a bit last-generation these days, but judging from The Long Tail not much has changed.  The outlook is self-involved and, to be frank, self-important. Chris Anderson looks out from Silicon Valley at the rest of the world and doesn’t know a whole lot about it – and he doesn’t think it important to know about it. When he quotes Karl Marx [62] he doesn’t actually quote Marx, he quotes a report on digital technology by think tank Demos. The Long Tail is a book on culture with no reference to life outside the USA (except for anime videos). Chris Anderson sees no reason to pay attention to  economists or social scientists (not a single economist who deals in the economics of information apart from his Berkeley neighbour Hal Varian, for example – no Stiglitz or Akerlof here), but calls essayist Clay Shirky "a prominent thinker". He quotes his intellectual stablemates Richard Posner, Virginia Postrel, and George Gilder, and says James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds – a quick read, but not deep – "needs to be read". There’s nothing wrong with quoting these people, but the contrast between his references to a certain kind of thinker from a certain kind of place and his complete neglect of so many other strands of thought is stark, especially in a book that does not claim any distinct political outlook.

This narrowness of vision is surely why he calls his own work "research" even when he is discovering things well known by many others. He is an intellectual imperialist: Columbus "discovering" America all over again – thinkers from outside his own intellectual neighbourhood just don’t count. The people who endorse the book are of course, as already pointed out, a coterie of Silicon Valley digerati (and the aforementioned Mr. Surowiecki).

The outlook of the author and the audience for the book come through in the terminology he uses. "Massively parallel" is a computing term – elsewhere he’s all, like, "impedance mismatch" and "fractal" and "network economics" and "meme" – the buzzwords of computer engineers and the Santa Fe Institute.

Given this outlook, it is not surprising that it takes Mr. Anderson just a couple of pages of sketchy story telling – references to a bunch of Internet "viral memes" such as Dancing Babies and the truly disgusting "goatse" picture – before he can conclude that the online world – his world – is far more diverse than the world outside his valley. "In short, we’re seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture." [184] He claims that, while the diversity of humanity "has always been true, but it’s only now something that we can act on. The resulting rise of niche culture will reshape the social landscape. People are re-forming into thousands of cultural tribes of interest, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests." [184] The narrowness of his own intellectual horizons, and the proportion of his influences that hail from California, suggest that this is less true than he would like to think.

Yochai Benkler is an interesting writer who Anderson pays attention to, although not in The Long Tail. Benkler has a much better picture of the way that the online shift is changing our culture, and what happens when "people shift their attention online" [181]. The picture he gives (Chapter 10 of The Wealth of Networks) documents that the online world is not one of "virtual communities" heralded by the optimists, and is not one of isolation and alienation feared by the pessimists. Instead, he argues that users "increase their connections with preexisting relations" [363] and leads to "weak ties" of networked individuals (rather than the stronger ties implied by the word "community") in the new relationships that we form. There is little indication of "tribes of interest", with the close ties that the phrase suggests, emerging online.

The section ends with a rare quote from an intellectual outside Anderson’s usual sphere of influence: "In 1958, Raymond williams, the Marxist sociologist, wrote in Culture and Society: ‘There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.’ He was more right than he knew." [185] Now maybe he means something other than the way I read this, but the sentence strikes me as remarkably arrogant. To assert that Williams, a first-rank thinker and hugely influential in our understanding of the ways that culture and society influence each other, was "more right than he knew" is not only patronizing, but patronizing in an innapropriate, almost embarrassing way given the relative intellectual standing of the two.

If the New Fits [185-189] is about blogs – a truly interesting development (especially for us bloggers). He focuses on two influential blogs (from the short head?): Daily Kos and Instapundit and points out that they are influential. As I argued in the notes to Chapter 5, he will get no argument from me that the development of social software as a platform for both publishing and conversation, is an important development – but it ain’t Long Tail.

A Million Little Pieces [189-191] starts off by asking if a "fragmented culture [is]  better or worse culture"? [189], and raises the question of whether the digital world may be a place where "you need not come across topics and view that you have not sought out." [189] – creating a polarized world of insular thought where, as he quotes Christine Rosen, "we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality" [190]. Anderson asks "Is Rosen right? I suspect not" [190] and then goes on a little idealistic detour that wanders between a paean to the openness and diversity of the online world. It is easy to agree with  the statement that "Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions" [191], but less easy to see what it has to do with the Long Tail – a tale where our access to variety is channelled through a small number of aggregators whose recommendation systems are private and hidden – a narrow range of (machine-based) experts and institutions indeed.

His optimism is engaging: "I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less" [191]. To dispute this seems Luddite in the colloquial sense – actual Luddites being admirable, or at lease understandable, and Scrooge-like. But one can see opportunities in the Internet – real innovation, of real novelty, and real social changes – without subscribing to The Long Tail’s particular muddled vision of commercial giants and social software platforms.

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the first part of Chapter 11 – Living in a Niche Culture. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

We’re getting towards the end of
the book now, and it is moving on from the core material to some
speculative asides about broader issues. The material in this chapter
illustrates the reasons for the book’s success and also one of its most
pervasive weaknesses – which is all about the meaning of the title.
Throughout the book, Chris Anderson uses the phrase "The Long Tail" to
mean several different things.

1.     It’s a business model (create a profitable business by "selling less of more")
    
2. It’s a commentary on the benefits of Internet commerce (online commerce is more diverse than those old physical shelves)
    
3.     It’s a trendspotting book about changes to contemporary culture (the end of the hit parade, the fall of the blockbuster)

The shift back and forth between these different meanings is what makes
the book so frustrating. Anderson wants to eat his cake and have it too
– which is the theme for this posting.

When it suits, Anderson can be very cautious about what he means by
"The Long Tail". Witness two entries in his blog. First, here’s part of
his response to Lee Gomes’s article, which I’ve mentioned a few times:

First, the book doesn’t claim that there are any cases where sales of products not
available in the dominant bricks-and-mortar retailer in a sector (my
definition of "tail") are larger than the sales of products that are
available in that retailer ("head")… Which is why the language Gomes
cites from the book jacket is actually all phrased in the future
conditional tense ("What happens when the combined value of all the
millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the
value of a few items that sell millions each?").

That "future conditional" thing is really a bit precious isn’t it?

Or here, in a post he calls What The Long Tail Isn’t:

There are many distortions of the term, but the most common
one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for "fringe"… for Long
Tail effects to work, you need both a head of relatively few hits and a tail of many niches, so that recommendations and other filters can lead consumers from one to the other.

A tail without a head is too noisy and apparently random to get
consumer traction; people need to start with the familiar and then
move, via trusted recommendations, to the unfamiliar. Likewise a head
without a tail is too limited in choice; the odds of finding a niche
you want are too low to bother exploring much beyond what you already
know.

Thus the two big Long Tail opportunities are:

1.     Aggregating hits and niches into a one big curve, from head to tail.
    
2.     Creating content and products that can plug into someone else’s aggregated curve.
    

He goes on to list some other things that "The Long Tail Isn’t":

•    Commodification – The LT is about nicheification, which is different.
     
   
•    Simple variety
  – Offering a few different choices or a bit of customization (like the
  sandwich filling options in the risible example above) is not enough.
  Long Tail effects kick in when you’re expanding variety and choice by
  orders of magnitude–from 10x to infinity.
     
   
•     The case for an all amateur, self-published future
  – The LT will probably have as much commercial content as ever. It will
  just be joined by far more amateur fare, forming a relatively seamless
  continuum from pros to ams.
     
   
•    The actual end of hits
  – The LT ends the tyranny of hits, shifting the market equally to
  niches. But it certainly acknowledges that some things will continue to
  be a lot more popular than others. Powerlaw distributions are as
  natural as diversity itself.
   
•    A focus on small markets at the exclusion of large ones – Again, you need both hits and niches to allow the filters and recommendation engines to work, driving demand down the curve from the known to the unknown.
     
   
•    Just any powerlaw
  – Powerlaws are ubiquitous. Long Tails are not. The first shows up
  anywhere you have variety, inequality, and network effects (word of
  mouth). The second requires massive variety and a wide range between
  the hits and niches. After all, many short tails are simply truncated
  powerlaw distributions. They just aren’t, er, long.
   

Mr. Anderson wants to have it both ways.

He wants to disown
the wilder uses of his catch phrase, ignoring the fact that the
catchiness is the core of its popularity and influence. Also, he is not
immune to misusing the phrase himself. He wants to say that "offering a
few choices or a bit of customization" is not Long Tail – yet he writes
about twenty varieties of flour as the "Long Tail of flour" [11], or
customized T-shirts as the "Long Tail of fashion " [50]. He disowns "a
focus on small markets at the exclusion of large ones", and yet writes
that microbreweries are the "Long Tail of beer" [50]. He says that
"just any powerlaw" is not a long tail and yet describes cities as "The
Long Tail of urban space" [150] and Al Qaeda as "The Long Tail of
national security" [50]? If it wasn’t for the aura of universality that
such misuses create then the thesis of the book would have attracted
much less attention than it has.

The first section of Chapter 11 is about The History of House Sound of Chicago,
a book by Stuart Cosgrove. The emergence of this form of music in the
early 1980s, from the embers of disco, is the story of a "proto-Long
Tail music culture" [177]. Mr. Anderson backs up the claim by reference
to the three forces of the Long Tail from Chapter 4:

• "It
  started with the spread of  affordable technology, from mixing decks to
  multitrack recorders. That’s the first force of the Long Tail, the
  democratization of the tools of production." [178]
• An explosion
  of records created the need for a way for people to get to them: "Which
  is exactly what clubs and warehouse parties offered, thus providing the
  necessary second force — democratized distribution" [179]
• The "hyperspecialized genres" of house music were identified by a
  proliferation of distinct record labels, sometimes owned by the same
  company: "Indie record labels are like tags, providing clues to which
  microgenre a track is likely to be" [179]. This "connects supply and
  demand" which is his third force.

Does Chicago House music have anything to do with the Long Tail? Well,
what I know about House music could fit on a single 45rpm label, but
the answer is clearly No.

The
story of the House Sound of Chicago is a familiar story about the
emergence of a subculture in a particular physical place and time – it
is an example of variety and minority-interest culture emerging from
the very offline, physical proximity whose limitations he decries in
the remainder of the book.

Looking back at the criteria for
something to be Long Tail, there is nothing here about either
"Aggregating hits and niches into a one big curve, from head to tail"
or "Creating content and products that can plug into someone else’s
aggregated curve." Whereas Anderson claims that The Long Tail is not "a
focus on small markets at the exclusion of large ones", the indie music
he is invoking did just that. As for his "three forces": folk music in
the broadest sense has always been produced by cheap technology, from
harmonicas to fiddles to guitars to whistles, so there is nothing new
there. Using clubs and parties as a way to share and provide access to
music? Been done for hundreds or thousands of years. And the idea of
labels as being "like tags" is simply a way of relating the culture of
music to the culture his core audience is familiar with, which is the
online computer world.

Elsewhere, Anderson laments that the physical world limits cultural
diversity because of what we might call the Bollywood Problem: culture
that appeals to a specific group of widely dispersed people has to
reach a certain threshold of appeal in a single locale before
being viable, and so might be viable nowhere (well, in North America
anyway). One of the many things he neglects about the cultural
phenomena at the core of his book is the fact that much of culture is
not a "market" with distinct supply and demand. Culture as a
participatory activity involves an intermingling of supply and demand,
and it is precisely the specific nature of physical environments that
leads to the development of new genres and flavours of music, whether
it’s Northern Soul or the collectivist music ethic that started in Montreal with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and has now given us the snow-influenced best band in the world and has also travelled down the 401 to Toronto to produce the almost-great Broken Social Scene.

From "Or" Culture to "And" Culture
[180-182] continues with the big statements that Anderson disowns
elsewhere, starting off with "The Long Tail is nothing more than
infinite choice" [180]. Once people get on the internet "they don’t
just go from one media outlet to another — they simply scatter.
Infinite choice equals ultimate fragmentation" [181]. Yet he
simultaneously wants to say that this is "simply a rebalancing of the
equation, an evolution from an ‘Or’ era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. subcultures) to an ‘And’ era… Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass." [182]

So
if "Mass culture will not fall" and the Long Tail is not "The actual
end of hits" then why does he entitle a chapter "The Rise and Fall of
the Hit", or title sections "Who Killed the Hit Album?" [33] or "The
End of the Hit Parade" [31]? or write "We are turning from a mass
market back into a niche nation" [40]. Parsing "The End of the Hit
Parade" carefully (there is no tense, not even future conditional), you
could argue that ending the Hit Parade is different from Hits
themselves, but I think it’s fair to say, in a book as rhetorical as
this one, the author is out to create an impression that we are on the
edge of a bigger transition than a mere rebalancing of the equation.

I’d
like to say that Mr. Anderson needs to make up his mind, but plainly he
doesn’t need to at all. The ability to switch back and forth between
eschatology and business models is what gives the book its appeal, and
he’s done very well by it. The fact that it is inconsistent to the
point of foolishness appears not to matter. Too bad.

This set of posts has been a lot of fun. Thanks to those who have given me feedback along the way, and to those (like Dave of How To Furnish a Room and RAD) who have linked to it and said nice things about it. If you’re looking for a book to read, by the way, How To Furnish a Room is a great source of ideas.

I had some notes on each chapter and an idea of what I wanted to do with them once I finished reading The Long Tail, but it really is true that writing is a way of finding out what you think, so my views on the book have expanded along the way.

When I started out, I thought it would be enough to just go through the book as I have been doing, but now I don’t think that will quite do the trick. The book is really a Big Picture book, so once I get to the end (four more chapters) I think I’ll post a couple of Big Picture posts to wrap it up. Then I’ll really have to return the book to the library and read something else.