how the long tail warped our pop culture

How one hugely influential book fostered a business obsession, what it got wrong, and how its fans in the tech industry wrought havoc with it.

In 2006, Chris Anderson, then editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, finished expanding an article into a fully fledged book about the future of business. Despite a few years of research showing that the book’s main insight didn’t work in the real world, The Long Tail was the rallying cry behind countless tech ventures for a decade, and while it’s all but forgotten by the public, it was so highly influential we could argue that it’s partially responsible for the social fragmentation we see today. Now, it would be unfair to pin the blame for everything wrong with the world on just one book, but it would be wise to examine how one simple idea ran away with such profound effects.

So, what was the idea? Well, Anderson realized that without the limitations of a typical brick and mortar store, you no longer had to choose what few hundred DVDs, books, or albums to stock. Instead, you could sell tens of thousands of items and make your money not by riding the waves of blockbusters and pop phenoms, but from the “long tail” of titles and products beloved by the niches and with cult followings. Even more, he argued that the net value of this long tail is greater than that of every blockbuster, popular, mainstream title or product combined. Hence, the strategy for a 21st century business should be to divide and conquer these valuable niches.

In many ways, this sounds like market segmentation at first blush. You identify target consumers for your products, break them up into demographics, develop your model customer, then tailor your marketing to get their attention. And it is. The novel part is refining all these demographics to an unprecedented level. Forget men 18 to 35 with median income between $35,000 and $75,000 per year. Now, it’s white men 18 to 25 who like underground trance music and electro swing, but indulge in guilty pleasures of country pop when no one is around. Forget mainstream appeal. It’s all about those ever narrower demos and winning them over with hyper-personalized offerings.

why the long tail never really materialized

Except there’s a problem with this approach. People are more alike than not, and even though it’s cool to pretend that mass appeal is for the sheeple, there’s a reason why it exists and why Taylor Swift moved 114 million albums, has 91 million streams a month, and literally caused an earthquake with her concerts, while streamer Marc Rebillet is hardly a household name. As noted by researchers who looked into how The Long Tail hypothesis truly played out, we’re just not adventurous. We need to hear about things to know that they exist, and most of us are going to gravitate towards things that end up being popular in the mainstream because we know what we’ll consistently get.

Hold on though, we now have orders of magnitude more options to pursue. Why does the long tail constantly get longer and flatline sooner if we keep adding new products and titles? Well, partially because having Netflix’s 17,000 titles makes it impossible for us to choose, so we will go with a friend’s recommendation, whatever was advertised the most, or trust the algorithm. Having way too many choices actually causes panic for the typical person because they can’t reasonably evaluate thousands of options, and they will also be more likely to suffer from buyer’s remorse, feeling like they made a choice too quickly and failed to truly consider all the possibilities.

Even more interestingly, there are people who will absolutely dive deep into the niches to see what’s out there, but this doesn’t make for the majority of their consumption so even the very people on which The Long Tail said businesses need to build their entire marketing strategy around aren’t there. Streaming services are finding all this out the hard way as they spent billions on vast catalogs from which people only binge relative handfuls of heavily advertised and anticipated titles, then move on. Instead of rapidly monetizing the long tail, they’re heavily in debt, their data centers filled with content few people watch, but which costs tens of millions per month to stream.

when in doubt, double down on sunk costs

Of course, there’s a problem with reversing course now. Many billions of dollars were sunk into this model across media outlets, social platforms, streaming providers, and online merchants. Countless venture capitalists are still hoping their hundreds of bets on The Long Tail approach will pay off big even as they say they’re looking for as big of a TAM — Total Addressable Market — as possible. They built it, people came, then proceeded to act like people and cluster around the same things, pick favorites from an entire galaxy of choices, then mostly ignored the rest of their options, leaving said businesses and platforms scrambling for a palatable pivot.

In other words, the approach has to succeed because a lot of business people hyped up on the possibilities of the Internet read the book, praised it to their friends, put lots of money into the idea, and continued to refer to it as if it was a law of physics. If they were to go back on this, they’d need to admit they were wrong and wasted a whole lot of time, money, and effort on an concept that was basically debunked two years after it was published by researchers who just looked at some consumer data and found no evidence that The Long Tail was anywhere close to dethroning mainstream trends, as just about any entertainer or digital content creator will tell you.

If the theory was correct, there would be a digital creator middle class because just about every topic or type of video would snag enough followers to warrant clients and paid subscriptions. Publishing a book wouldn’t be a doomed venture for any no name author because, again, niche genre readers would snap up enough digital copies. The reality is that we’ve ended up with way too much stuff, content, and choice, we really don’t know what to do with all of it, so we more or less just ignore it and let it languish in obscurity. In fact, the only way niche creators can get mainstream recognition is by consistency and dumb luck when the algorithm gods happen to smile on them.

what we lost when chasing the niches

Millennials generally don’t have great memories of MTV. By the time many of us were watching it, it was rapidly filling its programming with reality shows featuring the kind of people you could have sworn bleached things that no one should, competing to be their worst, most awkward selves. But most of us have a soft spot for one show: TRL, or Total Request Live. Household names in music, including the current punchlines, were often featured on the show to promote their new albums, music videos, tours, and do interviews, as well as live performances. And more importantly, they gave us a shared idea of the sounds of our generation.

Now, obviously, we all liked different genres but the genius of TRL was to feature acts across the spectrum. From boy bands like NSYNC, to nu metal bands like Korn, to the industrial growls of Orgy and even Rammstein, to rap, hip hip, and R&B from the likes of Eminem, 50 Cent, and Usher, we were exposed to a wide variety of music, and with the internet at our disposal, the tools to explore these genres to their fullest. And yet, if someone asked if we’d ever heard of such and such new artist in school or college, our answer was probably yes because we caught them on TRL. This kind of shared experience about literally anything seems utterly unthinkable these days.

It’s here that we get to the issue of fragmentation. Fewer and fewer people watch the same shows, get same news, see the same ads, and hear about the same musicians and news stories. Prestige TV like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Stranger Things have become fewer and farther between. Likewise, their peak audiences were dwarfed by an order of magnitude by broadcast networks at the heyday of cable, networks which now primarily show crime procedurals for older audiences. Mainstream hits seem less diverse and more repetitive, typically rehashes of long existing properties born during the age of shared TV and movies.

why people want shared experiences

All right, fine, we live in different realities. What’s the problem? The problem is that it’s not good for us if we want a broader sense of community and a way to relate to those around us. Discussions with coworkers about TV shows shouldn’t feel like homework assignments, and we shouldn’t have to look up “what kind of music are kids into these days” and then ask with horror why in the name of all things cute and fluffy Spotify is telling us that sea shanties are number one on the streaming charts. This is not some sort of attempt to bemoan the variety we see today or urge conformity. It’s a plea for us to stop being force-fed through a firehose 24/7 to everyone’s disappointment.

Our current situation is a double-edged sword. More stuff than ever is getting made, more and more by people who wouldn’t have a chance to bring their creative visions to life. But fewer and fewer people on aggregate are watching it, with endless reams of content languishing in obscurity and being brutally cut by the streaming platforms which promised this content a home with disastrous results. We’ve ended up with too much stuff, not enough hours in the day, and herded into rabbit holes by algorithms and ads to figure out what we might actually like, then encouraged to binge in two to four hour blocks, the next episode or show cued up at the end of the last.

What we’re seeing right now with the flatlining of the creator economy, the streaming wars’ fallout playing out in writer and actor strikes, and the asymptotic distribution of attention and revenue in those areas, as well as the ongoing consolidation of major tech and media platforms, is a struggle to find a new business model that could work for everyone yet again. The age of the Great Fragmentation is running on fumes and you can hear its death rattles. What will take its place, we don’t know yet. But it’s very possible that we may want to simply resurrect what was working perfectly fine before we started chasing the long tail, just with new, better, and sleeker technology.