Πριν από λίγες ημέρες είχα αναφερθεί στο βιβλίο The Long Tail του Chris Anderson, αρχισυντάκτη του περιοδικού Wired, λέγοντας πως το βρήκα σχετικά ενδιαφέρον μεν αλλά κάτι δεν μου “καθόταν” καλά χωρίς, ωστόσο, να μπορώ να εντοπίσω τι. Ήρθε η ώρα να γίνω αναλυτικότερος.
Προσπαθώντας να ανακαλέσω τώρα τις σκέψεις που έκανα καθώς διάβαζα το βιβλίο αυτές είχαν κάπως έτσι:
“Ο Anderson λέει συνεχώς ότι το βιβλίο βασίζεται σε πολύ research, αναφέρει Harvard, MIT, Stanford κ.λπ., αλλά παραπομπές σε research δεν βλέπω…”
“Ενδιαφέρουσα αυτή η Long Tail theory, αλλά ‘LONG TAILS EVERYWHERE’; ‘Long tail of labor’; ‘Long tail of beer’; ‘Long tail of fashion’; ‘Long tail of education’; ‘Long tail of national security’; ‘Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music’; Τι δεν είναι Long Tail τέλος πάντων;”
“Δεν μας λέει και τίποτα πραγματικά καινούργιο. Επί της ουσίας παρόμοια πράγματα έχει πει κι ο Toffler από το 1980 ήδη καθώς και το ‘New Rules for the New Economy’. Άσε που η βασική του θέση, ότι δηλαδή το ηλεκτρονικό εμπόριο έκανε εφικτή την εκμετάλλευση των niche markets, είναι old news εδώ και χρόνια.”
“Άντε καλά, ας δεχτούμε ότι το Long Tail υπάρχει παντού. Γιατί τότε, όμως, ο Anderson αναφέρεται στις ίδιες εταιρείες-παραδείγματα όλη την ώρα;”
“‘What if the non-hits […] all together added up to a market as big as, if not bigger than, the hits themselves?’ Τραβηγμένο μ’ ακούγεται, τραβηγμένο…”
Αυτές ήταν μερικές από τις σκέψεις που έκανα. Ήμουν, όμως, σίγουρος ότι παρόμοιες σκέψεις με τις δικές μου θα είχαν κάνει κι άλλοι, περισσότερο έγκριτοι εμού, αναγνώστες / reviewers του βιβλίου οπότε έψαξα να τις βρω στο Google. Και τις βρήκα. Εάν, λοιπόν, η άποψη ενός άγνωστου, έλληνα blogger που γράφει στο blog του για “Marketing, Management, Business” ως χόμπι δεν είναι και τόσο σημαντική, τα reviews από την Wall Street Journal, Technology Review, New Yorker κ.ά., δεν μπορεί, θα είναι. Τι έχουν λοιπόν να μας πουν για το Long Tail;
1. The 98 Percent Rule
Ο πυρήνας της επιχειρηματολογίας του Anderson βρίσκεται στην αρχή του βιβλίου με τον τίτλο “THE 98 PERCENT RULE”. Έχετε υπόψιν πως ο Anderson γράφει:
Because I started my career in the science world and then learned economics at The Economist, I look for those trends first in hard data.
Με άλλα λόγια, ο συγγραφέας βασίζεται σε hard data πριν ισχυριστεί κάτι, εν προκειμένω:
Everywhere I looked the story was the same…The 98 Percent Rule turned out to be nearly universal
Τι μας λέει, λοιπόν, ο κανόνας του 98%; Με απλά λόγια, πως όσο inventory και να υπάρχει online κάποιος, κάπου θα το αγοράσει.
Ο Anderson φέρνει το παράδειγμα της Ecast, ο CEO της οποίας του είπε (δύο χρόνια πριν) πως το 98% των 10.000 άλμπουμ που διέθετε η εταιρεία πούλησαν τουλάχιστον ένα μουσικό κομμάτι ανά τρίμηνο. Για τον Anderson, το 80/20 rule (ή Pareto principle) δεν ισχύει πια και τη θέση του έχει πάρει το 98 percent rule.
Σήμερα, όμως, o Lee Gomes της Wall Street Journal αναφέρει (τα italics δικά μου)[1]:
Ecast told me that now, with a much bigger inventory than when Mr. Anderson spoke to them two years ago the quarterly no-play rate has risen from 2% to 12%. March data for the 1.1 million songs of Rhapsody, another streamer, shows a 22% no-play rate; another 19% got just one or two plays.
Ο Anderson ισχυρίζεται στο βιβλίο του πως οι πωλήσεις των “misses/non-hits” σταδιακά θα αυξηθούν τόσο πολύ ώστε να φτάσουν ή και να ξεπεράσουν τις πωλήσεις των hits. Ωστόσο, άλλα είπε σε προσωπική του επικοινωνία με τον Lee Gomes. Γράφει ο τελευταίος (τα italics δικά μου)[1]:
I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn’t have any examples of this actually occuring. At Netfflix and Amazon, two of his biggest case studies, misses won’t outsell hits for at least another decade, he said. None of these qualifications are in the book.
Σημειωτέον ότι στο Long Tail άρθρο που είχε γράψει ο Anderson, ισχυριζόταν πως περισσότερο από το 50% των πωλήσεων της Amazon βρισκόταν πέρα από τους top 130.000 τίτλους της. Στο βιβλίο του, ωστόσο, γράφει “about a quarter of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 100.000 titles”. Ακόμη όμως κι αυτό, το 25%, δεν ισχύει σύμφωνα με τον Gomes (τα italics δικά μου)[1]:
By Mr. Anderson’s calculation, 25% of Amazon’s sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can’t find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of these numbers -an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn’t meaningful- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon’s titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite impressive.
Ο Anderson ισχυρίζεται “hits are starting to rule less”. Ο Gomes, όμως, άλλα ανακάλυψε (τα italics δικά μου)[1]:
Ecast says 10% of its songs account for roughly 90% of its streams; montly data from Rhapsody showed the top 10% songs getting 86% of streams. Bloglines, the widely used blog- reading tool, lists 1.2 million blogs; real ones, not computer-generated “spam blogs”. The 10% of feeds grab 88% of all subscriptions. And 35% have no current subscribers at all -there’s clearly no 98 Percent Rule in the blogosphere. At Apple’s iTunes [άλλο ένα από τα παραδείγματα που χρησιμοποιεί ο Anderson στο βιβλίο του], one person who has seen the data -which Apple doesn’t disclose- said sales “closely track Billboard. It’s a hits business. The data tend to refute ‘The Long Tail.‘”
Το όλο θέμα εξετάζουν, βέβαια, κι άλλοι ερευνητές που, όμως, είναι πολύ πιο συγκρατημένοι στα συμπεράσματά τους. (Υπόψιν ότι ο ίδιος ο Anderson παρέπεμψε τον Gomes σε αυτούς λέγοντάς του ότι θα υποστηρίξουν τα συμπεράσματά του) . Για παράδειγμα, η Anita Elberse του Harvard, η οποία υπήρξε σύμβουλος στο research που έκανε ο Anderson για το βιβλίο του και η οποία ετοιμάζει μια μελέτη με τίτλο Entertainment Products in Online and Offline Channels: An Examination of the “Long Tail” ανέφερε σύμφωνα με τον Gomes (τα italics δικά μου):
that her work to date shows a “slight shift” towards the tail. But she also noted “a rapidly increasing number of titles that never, or very rarely, sell,” which suggests “it is difficult for content providers to profit from the ‘tail.’”
Ανάλογα πράγματα είπε κι ο Erik Brynjolfsson του MIT, co-author της μελέτης Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increase Product Variety at Online Booksellers. Σύμφωνα πάλι με τον Gomes [2]:
MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, who told me that there indeed is a shift occuring as things move online, but it’s on the order of an 80/20 distribution moving to a 70/30 one.
2. So, what else is news?
Σκεφθείτε το λίγο: ο ισχυρισμός του Anderson πως, με δυο λόγια, το internet κατέστησε εφικτή την εμπορική εκμετάλλευση διαφόρων niche markets είναι πρωτοποριακός; Εγώ, τουλάχιστον, νομίζω πως αυτό είναι old news και πιστεύω πως την ίδια γνώμη θα έχει οποιοσδήποτε απλώς και μόνον παρακολουθεί, από χόμπι αν θέλετε, τα του internet business. Τώρα, βέβαια, κάποιοι (πολλοί) μπορεί να διαφωνούν όπως, για παράδειγμα, ο φίλτατος Νίκος από το πολύ αξιόλογο NYLON (διαβάστε τα σχόλια στο αρχικό μου post).
Ας δούμε, όμως, τι γράφει σχετικά το Technology Review (τα italics δικά μου) [3]:
When world of the book bubbled around the digital water cooler a few years ago, among the digerati that make up my world, its main idea –simply stated, that digital commerce enables businesses to create successful niche markets– was hardly revolutionary. For those who have been covering the entertainment industries for any length of time, this idea has been discussed for years. For that reason, I think, I was initially put off by the idea of the book: it just wasn’t news or news making. While those in various industries were searching for ways to capitalize on the end of the inventory age, Anderson seemed to be discovering that inventory no longer mattered.
Και συνεχίζει ο reviewer, σχετικά με τα niche markets (τα italics δικά μου) [4]:
Where Anderson’s thesis begin to derail, though, is on page nine, when he declares: “To think that basically everything you put out there [on the Web] finds a demand is just odd.” But anyone who’s spent any time online wouldn’t find it “odd” that basically everything finds an audience. In fact, those who’ve adopted a digital lifestyle know that it is the nature of the Web.[…]
The point is that niche markets have existed long before the digital era, although many have existed beyond the reach of the large entertainment companies. […]
You would not realize any of this, though, by reading Anderson’s introduction. For him, this “long tail”, as he calls it, was revealed to him on 2004, and was the beginning of a new economy.
Επιπλέον (τα italics δικά μου) [5]:
That Anderson continues to call the digital economy revolutionary — when pages before he described it as the outgrowth of a long history of commerce — is laughable, but forgivable. […]
Ας δούμε και το review του New Yorker (τα italics δικά μου) [6]:
All this is snappily argued and thought-provoking, if not quite as original as Anderson’s publishers would have us believe. Back in 1980, another futurologist, Alvin Toffler, anticipated the “de-massifying” of society in his best-selling book “The Third Wave” (Bantam; $7.99), which is still in print. “The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation and entertainment, ” Toffler said in a 1999 interview. But no longer: “The era of mass society is over….No more mass production. No more mass consumption…No more mass entertainment.”[…]
The Internet has accelerated the trends that Toffler identified, but that’s not news either. In 1998, Kevin Kelly, a technology writer who also worked for Wired, published a book called “New Rules for the New Economy,” in which he described the emerging order thus: “Niche production, niche consumption, niche diversion, niche education. Niche World.”
3. Long tails everywhere?
Ο Anderson βλέπει Long Tails παντού: “Long tail of labor”. “Long tail of beer”. “Long tail of fashion”. “Long tail of education”. “Long tail of national security”. “Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music”. Οπότε γεννάται, εύλογα, το ερώτημα: Tι δεν είναι Long Tail τέλος πάντων;…
Γράφει σχετικά ο David Jennings [7]:
I found myself struggling with the analysis of the rise of Chicago House music, which explains that, “Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music” (my emphasis) and that “clubs and warehouse parties offered… democratized distribution”. Maybe such analysis will become widely accepted, and the resistance I feel will be similar to that which Freud’s first readers experienced when informed that certain behaviours were really about killing your father and sleeping with your mother. Time will tell.
Και το Slate [8]:
The Long Tail theory is so catchy it can overgrow its useful boundaries. Unfortunately, Anderson’s book exacerbates this problem. When you put it down, there’s one question you won’t be able to answer: When, exactly, doesn’t the Long Tail matter?[…]
The tagline on the book’s cover reads, “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More,” [στο δικό μου αντίτυπο το tagline είναι “How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand”…] which is certainly wrong or at least exaggerated. Inside we learn about “the Long Tail of Everything.” Anderson’s book, unlike his original Wired article, threatens to turn a great theory of inventory economics into a bad theory of life and the universe. He writes that “there are now Long Tail markets practically everywhere you look,” calling offshoring the “Long Tail of labor,” and online universities “the Long Tail of education.” He quotes approvingly an analysis that claims, improbably, that there’s a “Long Tail of national security” in which al-Qaida is a “supercharged niche supplier.” At times, the Long Tail becomes the proverbial theory hammer looking for nails to pound.
Το Long Tail, εν αντιθέσει με αυτά που ισχυρίζεται ο Anderson, έχει όρια.
Συνεχίζει το Slate:
What are the Long Tail’s limits? As a business model, it matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero and 2) where consumers have strong and heterogeneous preferences.[…]
But it’s important to remember that many industries don’t rely on the weird economics of information products. Take the oil industry, which Anderson doesn’t discuss, but whose significance is obvious -compare Exxon’s $371 billion in revenues in 2005 to Google’s $6.1 billion. The Long Tail doesn’t seem to tell us much about the future of the oil biz.[…]
There aren’t Long Tails everywhere. Instead, for every diverse Long Tail there’s a “Big Dog”: a boring standardized industry that isn’t sexy like Apple or Amazon but that delivers all that niche content you’re hungry for. For example, there’s the telecommunications side of the Internet, the backbone carriers that exist purely to deliver content. Their standardization makes accessing the Long Tail possible.[…]
Anderson says that eBay “is both the Long Tail of products and the Long Tail of merchants.” But eBay is easy to understand withoutThe Long Tail: It lowers the transaction costs of buying and selling used goods, whether they are niche products or not. If you call that a Long Tail, then the word means nothing more than “make easier to buy.” And then everything from the Yellow Pages, to paper money, to my real estate agent has suddenly grown a Long Tail.[…] picking up
Όχι μόνο δεν υπάρχουν Long Tails παντού αλλά, συνεχίζει το Slate, επίσης:
The Long Tail also sometimes doesn’t work in its home category: the information-technology business. The key issue is the question of standardization. Sometimes consumers want a diverse set of product offerings. But sometimes they prefer a standard or compatible product. Most of Anderson’s examples are content firms, where product diversity is almost always a good thing. But in the information-transport industry, standardization is usually more important. Do people want 10 different types of (incompatible) Internet connections? Or just the fastest one they can get? How about 30 types of (incompatible) Ethernet cables?
4. The end of the hits era?
Ο Anderson ισχυρίζεται ότι οι ημέρες των hits είναι λίγο-πολύ μετρημένες. Γράφει: “the primary effect of the long tail is to shift our taste towards niches”, “hits are not quite the economic force they once were” κ.λπ. [Τα data, ωστόσο, σύμφωνα με τον Gomes, δεν δείχνουν κάτι τέτοιο (βλ. 1. The 98 Percent Rule)].
Σχολιάζει, επιπλέον, το New Yorker (τα italics δικά μου) [6]:
The least convincing part of Anderson’s book is his treatment of what he calls “the short head,” the part of the curve where popular products reside. Although he acknowledges that best-selling books and blockbuster movies won’t vanish overnight, he suggests that demand for them will gradually decline: “the primary effect of the long tail is to shift our taste towards niches.”
Is this what we’re seeing? In the film industry, more movies are being produced than ever before, but seven of the ten all-time top-grossing films worldwide have come out since 2000: three “Lord of the Rings” movies, three “Harry Potter” movies, and “Shrek 2.”[…] Four of the top-selling novels ever published -the works of J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown- have appeared since 2000, too.
The mucis industry, on which Anderson bases much of his argument, may be a special case. […] the music market had begun splintering well before the Web arrived. File-sharing and the iPod accelerated this trend, but this hasn’t eroded the demand for the most popular songs: if illegal downloads are included in the “sales figures,” the over-all demand for songs by supergroups like U2 and the Rolling Stones may be greater than ever.
A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things. […] far more people will turn up for the fifth “Harry Potter” film and “Shrek 3,” because they’ll want to see the movies that everybody’s talking about. Big-time movie releases aren’t merely stories and images on a screen; they’re news events […]
It’s the same for books and popular music: the more copies a thriller or a pop song sells, the more likely you are to pick it up to see what all the fuss is about. Even in the online era, to be human is to follow the herd. Far from undermining this “network effect,” the Internet strengthens it by providing instant communication and feedback.
Σχολιάζει, επιγραμματικά, ο Gomes (τα italics δικά μου) [1]:
But while every singer-songwriter dreams from his bedroom of making a living off iTunes, few actually do, mostly because many others have the very same idea. And to the extent that Apple is making money off iTunes, thanks go to Nelly Furtado and other hitmakers. Indeed, you can make the case that the Internet is amplifying the role of hits, even in relation to misses; not diminishing them.
Και το Variety (τα italics δικά μου) [9]:
Still, does it really follow that hits, as Anderson asserts, “are not quite the economic force they once were?” There’s certainly no evidence of a causal relationship. Despite all the activity on YouTube, iTunes and peer-to-peer networks, Anderson admits he doesn’t really know whether this steals directly from the audience for mass-appeal content, or is simply additive media consumption expanding the market.
[…] He points out, “The theatergoing audience is falling even as the population grows,” but that doesn’t necessarily prove hits are waning. After all, people are watching movies many different ways today: DVD, pay-per-view, cable and digital download.
Anderson’s dismissal of the TV business is that “every year network TV loses more of its audience to hundreds of niche cable channels.” But cable is full of popular channels such as ESPN, USA and Lifetime that hardly qualify as “niche.”
[…] a major culprit for plunging album sales is the millions of people illegaly downloading hits every day.
[…] Thanks to digital technology, more people are consuming more hits than ever — on more platforms than ever.
Το Economist (τα italics δικά μου) [10]:
[…] And the way in which the internet makes it easy for people to share likes and dislikes about entertainment will help hits as well as more obscure material.
[…] It may be that only the middling, manufactured sort of hit will fall by the wayside: the genuinely popular variety will remain just as powerful. Most hits start somewhere in the long tail and move up; so as content in the tail becomes easier to discover, the hits that emerge from it should also be of higher quality.
5. Word-of-mouth, filters, network effects, independence and the wisdom of crowds
Αναφέρει ο Jennings [7]:
If word-of-mouth feedback is what creates the steep fall-off shape, should the internet’s amplification and speeding up of word-of-mouth make the fall-off steeper? Why shouldn’t the amplification mean there is worse access to, or worse awareness of, the reputation-poor niches? Does the amplification apply unevenly, or does the third force (filters and recommendations to connect supply and demand) counteract it?
Anderson seems to imply that maybe both of these apply. He says, “filtering is often most effective at the genre level rather than across the entire market… between genres their [filters’] effect is more muted.” I struggled to follow the evidence to support this argument. How could filters and recommendations work best at genre/category scale, when genres and categories are abstract constructs that people impose over data, and the genres I use to divide a catalogue may not be the same ones you use? […]
[…] Anderson refers several times to the term The Wisdom of Crowds, named after James Surowiecki’s book of the same name. In charting how ‘the many can be smarter than the few’, Surowiecki specifies clear conditions on which the wisdom of the crowds depends (summarised in Wikipedia), and gives many examples of circumstances when crowds are the opposite of wise.
Anderson’s liberal, broad-brush references to the wisdom of crowds ignore these conditions and imply that it can be taken for granted across many situations: “Yahoo music ratings, Google PageRank, MySpace friends, Neflix user reviews -these are all manifestations of the wisdom of the crowd”. No, they’re not. Many of them fail Surowiecki’s conditions, and fall prey to what he calls ‘information cascades‘ (a lack of independence between the people making the ratings or reviews). Anderson even contradicts himself in this area. Referring to Top 10 lists, he asserts, “There’s nothing wrong with ranking by popularity -afterall, that’s just another example of a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ filter.” But then he says things that don’t sell well may be just as good as those that do, and argues a few pages later that, “The movies don’t get worse at rank 100 (some would argue they actually get better)”. Apparently he puts little store in the ‘wisdom’ of the rankings.
6. Business advice (well, sort of)
Δεν νομίζω ότι χρειάζεται κανείς να έχει σπουδάσει μάρκετινγκ για να καταλάβει τα αυτονόητα: “One distribution method doesn’t fit all”. “One product doesn’t fit all”. “One price doesn’t fit all”.
Σχολιάζει σχετικά το BusinessWeek (τα italics δικά μου) [11]:
The book also comes up short on practical advice for anyone who wants to build a business catering to the long tail. In one eight-page chapter, Anderson reveals this “secret”: “1. Make everything available,” and “2. Help me find it.” You probably don’t need to read this book to figure that out. And the nine specific rules he offers, such as “Move inventory way in…or way out” and “One price doesn’t fit all,” seem either crypticobvious. or
Θα κλείσω αυτό το post…on anabolics παραθέτοντας δύο (ναι, ακόμη!) αποσπάσματα. Το πρώτο είνα από ένα forthcoming report της JupiterResearch[12] και το δεύτερο από τον Andrew Olrowski του The Register [13].
It is not enough to simply say that the limitless stocking capacity, search-ability, and relatively low-cost distribution of the Internet enables greater content availability than media restricted by limited distribution (there are only so many networks, or store shelves, or weekends for movie openings in a year). Rather, one has to prove that a) there is a significant demand for non-blockbuster entertainment, b) that the lon tail can change the Pareto principle (a.k.a. the 80-20 rule, another “power law distribution“), and c) that anyone can make money off the tail, without delivering the head also.
There’s a knack to getting the buzzword book formula right. The idea can’t be false - but it shouldn’t be falsifiable either. The idea should be simple enough to be explained by the subtitle, but vague enough to suggest applicability to all kinds of different markets - like a bland, all-occassions scent. And it must flatter the reader into thinking they are cleverer, and much more special than they were when they began reading the book.
Παραπομπές:
[1] It May Be a Long Time Before the Long Tail Is Wagging the Web
[2] Lee Gome responds to Chris Anderson
[3] The Long Tail: a Pre-Review
[4] The Long Tail: A Review — Part 2
[5] The Long Tail Review — Part 3
[6] In the new “long tail” marketplace, has the blockbuster met its match?
[7] Review of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
[8] The Wrong Tail. How to turn a powerful idea into a dubious theory of everything
[13] The Long Tail’s maths begin to crumble
Σημείωση: Αυτό το post αναδημοσιεύεται από το προσωπικό μου blog.
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