Category Archives: long tail

Long tail, small earnings?

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Struggling producer? In a post from “The long tail” a small movie director has written an interesting e-mail to Chris Anderson.

But the reality at this time for me and my company is that I need to find multiple large national distributors if I hope to even come close to making a living at this game. And I need to produce fresh content on a reasonably frequent basis. In short, I am a much smaller and more struggling version of the giants that have preceded me.

Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER. But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom. Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.

The general idea of the e-mail is that the long tail with niche content is nice for the consumer but that it is hard for the producer. Fundamentally there are only a few customers in the long tail so it is hard to make money for producers. Since when you produce it takes almost the same amount of time and money to make a blockbuster than to make a niche product. It is a great niche product when you have three really dedicated fans but how much money will you make.

Most of the success stories in the long tail are from distributors for whom it does not matter what item they sell since their business model is based on the total amounts of all products sold together (in the end they are all bits on a platter). And fact is that due to small world effects it is the big “hub-distributors” that are getting bigger and bigger. This might mean that in the end we end up with only a few and powerful distributors since they are the only one with a large enough audience to make your niche product profitable. Somehow that has a familiar smell to it…

Conversation

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The Athens AgoraSome books are very helpful in making you understand developments. This summer I have read a book called “The Cluetrain manifesto”. Central theme of the book (which by the way is written in 2000 but started as as website in 1999) is the statement that markets (and a lot of other things) are conversations. The way companies use corporate communications and PR to tell us how we should think about them simply does not work anymore.

It makes you think. When I go to the market each Saturday to get the ingredients for a nice dinner I am in constant conversation. I tell the girl that always helps me with the vegetables how they were last week and she tells me what kind of specials she has this week. Sometimes we discuss how the ingredients are best used for the recipe I will be making. I learn from her and sometimes I can tell her new things. Same with the small butcher that I go to. In essence this is a weekly conversation that accompanies the business we do together. The one greatly enhances the other.

In a way this is the natural way people started doing business. Democracy and debate became of age in the Agora of Athens that was established as a marketplace. It is only with the establishment of big companies that we lost the conversational way of doing business. And because of this greater distance we created corporate communication to tell people what we think they should think of our company. But we stopped listening and forgot about two way conversation.

Internet and especially the social networks it supports again creates the opportunity to be in conversation with the market. Not to tell people why your product is so great but to be in conversation about the features people want. People love to help companies to improve the products they like, all they ask is that they listen and take them seriously.

I think here is a message for a lot of companies. More and more it will be needed to open up the company and invite people from the outside to help. With the development of new products, with how the product can be implemented.

The market is a conversation and conversations go in two directions (at least the nice ones, don’t you think?).

One of the other great books I have read this summer is linked, a book about the theory of small world networks. Many know about the famous Milgram experiment where he showed that most people in the world are connected by not more than six handshakes. Linked shows that this is because society has a “small world” topology, meaning that we have many closely related groups that are coupled by “connectors”, people that have many long range connections. The funny thing is that this type of network is also fairly common in nature, e.g. the way neurons are connected in the brain and the way fireflies synchronizes their lights. He describes many forms of these networks and simulations he did with this topology. I think this work has a lot of design rules in it how to create successful social networks. Somehow I think for example that the dunbar number (which relates to groups size and dynamics) is related to this. I will get back to that some other time.

A thousand lies

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This is such an interesting example of how our new production of information can go wrong:This is an interview with Christine Boutin, the French minister of housing, about the conspiracy that George W Bush is behind the attack on the WTC towers on 9/11. A small translation of the first part goes like this:

I think that it’s possible. I think that it’s possible… I think it is possible. I think it more especially as I know that the sites that speak of is problem are the sites that have the greatest numbers of visits….And so, I tell myself, I who am extremely sensitive…to the new techniques of information and communication, that this expression of the mass of the people cannot be without any truth. I’m not telling you that I adhere to that position, but let’s say that, nevertheless, I’m questioning myself a bit on this question

Some time ago I talked about the fact that due to ease of copying information of the Internet it is possible for an item of information to multiply rapidly. And a thousand lies remain a thousand lies.

This I think is an excellent example why we have to rewire the way we interpret information due to change that Internet brings us.

Ladybird

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LadybirdOriginally uploaded by Vigdis T
Sometimes the power of the long tail amazes me. The picture on the side is of a ladybird. It is coming from the group “Tiny animals on fingers”. Oh yeah, I suppose this is not a picture of a ladybird but a picture of a ladybird on a finger.

Of this group there are 448 members. Amazing.

Skeeler 2.0

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Delegation of work and responsibility should be done to the people with the greatest stake in the result and who are best equipped to handle the task. This is true in organisation theory as well in the cooperation between companies and their customers.

In interesting development in this area is TomTom Map Share. Here it is possible to add changes to the card and share these improvements with others (and TomTom). It is a logical division of labor: I can change the map when something is wrong and it bothers me and TomTom can use it to improve the map. There are of course some dangers like somebody who changes the map because they do not like the traffic through their street. But if enough people use this service it will be possible to use the wisdom of crowds.

In the past I used an application called Wayfinder which used real time map data on the mobile phone over a GPRS link. Here I could suggest changes and some days later my phone used the improved map data. In a world where “content is king” these methods to improve the data by using the large groups of user is promising. 

Another example is “skeeler 2.0” at Telematica Insituut. In this research project we focus on Skeelers. For Skeelers it is important to have a general idea on the quality of the road, the amount of traffic, the view on the scenery and others. And who is better equipped to collect and tag the data needed to improve the normal maps for Skeeler use than the Skeelers themselves. One of the focal points in this project is how best to collect the data: is it possible to ask questions afterwards, is it possible to measure the quality of the road by using a sensor? Maybe it is even important to take the profile of users in consideration. A route that A likes very much may be boring or not challenging enough for another.

Finding ways to incorporate implicit and explicit reactions from users will be an important factor in improving quality. We have the means to collect. Now we must learn how to make good use of all that data.

Is your past coming to get you?

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Just after my last post I read this article about the way digital traces from a young and sometimes foolish past can catch up to you. In the article I mentioned above from danah boyd a hypothetical case is written where somebody gets confronted during a job interview with the fact that she has protested against the WTO and Chinese policies (full case from the Harvard Business Review can be found here). In the guidance committee for Rathenau I talked about in the last post we also talked about a similar issue: what about all the pictures, video’s and other digital traces that show that we did some pretty silly things (well, I did… of course way past …).

Some of these things we would like not to be brought up during a job interview (or during a sales call, or …). Privacy seems to be terminally ill if she would not already have been deceased during my last post. Or is the context changing?

I think that the context is changing rapidly. Not just my silly actions from the past are online, yours are too, with the rest of the world. If people do not put the information online themselves, your ex-partner will (I will not post the link to this site due to bad taste, of the site that is :-) ). It is a bit like in the movie “Crocodile Dundee”

Crocodile Dundee is explaining how they handle it when somebody has a problem in the Bush: If you have a problem, you tell Wally. Wally tells everyone … No problem.

When all our escapades are online than we will not be surprised to find all kinds of information that in the past we would have found not suitable. But now all is online. Just look in the digital mirror once in a while…

You put it on Internet, Internet tells everyone, No problem!

Dumb and Dumber

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Evolution is driven by selection and attrition. The adapted ones flourish and the others wither away into oblivion. That also means that new and improved versions (of our genetically previous us for example) are build upon the DNA of the already improved version. And that is a Good Thing. As well as being the main reason we evolved in creatures that created Internet, Blogging and Youtube.

One of the nice aspects of the days before the Internet was that a lot of mechanism were available to filter talent so we will not be pestered by people incapable of the content they are pestering us with. In order to make a movie you had to go to a academy and before somebody gave you a budget you had to prove you have the talent by showing previous work, e.g. work done as an assistant to somebody else.

Also, quality costs money. Well, in most cases anyhow. You can not imagine a movie like Schindlers list, Moulin Rouge or Forrest Gump made on a shoestring budget. Talent costs money. High level camera’s costs money. There are of course the proverbial exceptions: El Mariachi from Robert Rodriquez (7000 dollar budget) and maybe The Blair witch project (or was this the first example of Internet hype?). But normally big budgets show through the quality of the movie and increases the chance of a good evening.

At the moment all filters have been removed for producing content. A camera can be bought for a few hundred euro’s, everybody wants to be a star and once uploaded to Youtube, you and me can watch it (or have to plough through it in order to find interesting work). According to Andrew Keens and this book “The Cult of the Amateurs” this will kill our culture. Everything will gravitate to mediocrity because we do not have filters to prevent the amateurs from publishing.

As you can imagine lots of comments are heard from the blogosphere. People like Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer and others are scolding him for placing doubts on the Great New Future that we are entering (though Clay Shirky has a much more balanced opinion). Where all people have numerous ways to express themselves and democracy will set us free. Problem is that with all those people expressing themselves, who will listen? Who will risk the time and money to produce quality content and will we find it? If you look at Wikipedia it is obvious that much information is in there because people first found it in serious media like encyclopedia’s and copied it or wrote it from recollection. When Wikipedia has starved the encyclopedia’s: who will do the research needed to separate fact from fiction? We might end up as the monkey behind the typewriter (or the “improved” version behind Microsoft Word).

One of the things we have to realize is that our filters from production side are gone. We now have to create the filters on the consumer side. Youtube is a million times crap and a few diamonds (and everything in between). And my kind of diamond may not be yours…. Research into the mechanisms to filter content are only just beginning. Number of views is a very basic mechanism. We need much more advanced mechanism based on who did the tagging, how does his profile look like me, did he stop looking after 3, 15 or 300 seconds. And much, much more. The amount of noise we have to filter is not ten times as loud but a million or more times as loud. This I think is one of the most important directions for research.

An important one I think is that our current structures to create quality are under pressure. When there are numerous producers most will all barely make a living. As consumers we get our niche content on the long tail but won’t we miss the high quality content? Music selling three times a month may be a business model for Rhapsody but it is no viable business model for the artist. Who is going to support the journalist that has to do deep and extensive research (who would uncover Watergate)?

I love the Internet, I (to my surprise) love blogging, I love Youtube and fact that many can express themselves. I love the freedom that “zero cost” distribution means for the availability of niche content. But beware of the Evangelists who only look at the positive side of this.

As a colleague of mine, Rogier Brussee, always says: people remain people, in real life and on the Internet. Same goals, same dreams, same motives. Good and Bad. The difference is some limits are removed that we have in normal life are not there on the Internet, for the good as well as the bad guys. For this we have to create new modes of organization. Like the reputation mechanism on E-bay, Karma on Slashdot and others.

Evolution as a society means adapting ourselves to a new reality, the good and the bad sides. Turning a blind eye to all the negative aspect means that (human) nature takes care of the attrition of all the wonderful possibilities that there are because many people will stop using them. Only the fittest survive. And that is a Good Thing!

Bubbles

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Don’t you get tired of choice? I do.

Some time ago I had to arrange a new connection for TV, Telephone and Internet for my mother who has moved from Spain to Arnhem. In the old days you just called KPN and: presto. Now there is unlimited choice with very little help. In the end I always have the nagging feeling that I probably did not make the best choice possible…

I have the same feeling when looking at sites like Youtube. There is so much choice and I have to make all those choices myself. Yesterday I was drinking a beer with Rene van Buuren and, beside other issues I will not talk about here :-) , we had a conversation about choice. His statement was that unlimited choice (for example in TV channels) is a temporary thing. In the end we will have a limited number of channels that we watch. The difference with now will be that on those channels there are no fixed broadcasters but a selection will be made from the unlimited supply of content. Partly by experts and partly by “the crowd” in a “free zone”.

Though I am not sure about the fixed number channels I agree that unlimited choice is not a natural and sustainable state for us humans. We do not want to choose all the time but we wish that many choices are made for us. You can see it in the way people watch video’s on youtube: I think many people hardly ever completely watch the video but they get bored and move on to the next. Many of the top viewed movies are terribly boring but just happened to show a nice woman in the thumbnail picture (some things never change…). So watching a fixed channel may be a good solutions to be entertained.

I do not think the channels will be fixed but that we will be able to create a profile. The selection of content will be based on that profile. TV will be much more tailored to the person watching without the  burden of choice but only some feedback once in a while.

Add some random choices to it so you get surprised once in a while. Than finally we can get back to a couch potato evening.

Career moves

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Maybe, given other choices, you could have been another Steven Spielberg. Maybe even better.

Steven Spielberg became Steven Spielberg because he made the choices early on that were fitting with his talent. And since in a short tailed world success breeds success he became one of the most successful directors since producers are inclined to play it safe in the choice of directors (everybody is going to look at the latest Spielberg). But no doubt there are many more people out there that have the talent of a spielberg but made different career choices and became mediocre architects.

On of the interesting aspects of the long tailed world introduced by youtube is that more people can try out their talent. With hard work, bit of luck and lots of recommendations you can get popular in the long tail and slowly but surely move up the tail to where it gets interesting for producers. A series on youtube I love is “mr. Deity”. On their websitethey explicitly state they are making this series on youtube because they wish to make a series on TV.

What is Mr. Deity?
Mr. Deity is a semi-monthly video series (every two weeks) that looks at God and the Universe with a smile (and sometimes, a wink).

What is your goal?
Our goal is to turn this into a half-hour series for television.

Below you can see one episode of the series on youtube:

This, I think, is a very interesting development. People who feel they have the talent now have a much better opportunity to show this for a worldwide audience. And of course they start out at the long end of the long tail. Their mother will watch it and than some friends. And friends of their friends and friends of their mothers and … well you understand. Before you know it I am watching it as well as a producer at a big network. If the talent is there it is now possible to move out of the long end of the tail and into mainstream where you can make a living out of the things you can do best (and love to do).

Of course there are also lots of examples of people trying to do things they do not have a talent for and there are many, many examples of this at sites like youtube. But as long as the recommendation mechanisms work and I am able to find the good ones I am happy. What do you want to become?