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music, fi lms, or topics is such that these non-hits (or at least, not
current
hits) represent
'a market as big as, if not bigger than, the hits themselves' (2007: 8).
Sold as a 'business' topic,
The Long Tail
left readers with the memorable insight
that in the new digital economy, businesses could cater to fans of all kinds of things
and still make a profi t. Whilst it would still be good to have big successes, the
emphasis would shift from a focus solely on mass-market, 'lowest common denom-
inator' hits to a broader and rational support for making available
anything
that
someone, somewhere, might want, because that business was as good as any other
kind of business.
This was all interesting and, at the time, a revolutionary observation (although,
as Anderson acknowledges, it was basically the insight that Jeff Bezos of Amazon
had had a decade earlier). But perhaps the most important
cultural
point of
The
Long Tail
was lost on most readers at the time - including me.
What
now
seems really striking is that you can forget about big media altogether.
The point is not 'the long tail is also quite interesting'. The point is that the long tail
is
everything
that is most interesting - it's genuinely rich and interesting and won-
derful. The things with big audiences aren't the successful siblings of everything
else - they're in a different category. But they're not in a
better
category.
One of the errors made by critics such as Natalie Fenton (
2012
) is to look at
online media through a traditional media lens, where size of audience is a key mea-
sure of signifi cance. Comparing the online presence of established media brands,
such as CNN and the BBC, with home-made sites made by amateur enthusiasts in
their spare time, Fenton unsurprisingly fi nds that the former have much bigger audi-
ences (pp. 134-5). Rather more surprisingly, she concludes from this that self-made
media is a waste of time, made by deluded narcissists (I paraphrase, but that
is
what
she says - see Fenton
2012
: 135). Even if we ignore that extreme misanthropic
view, the old-media lens nevertheless tells us that a typical article on the BBC web-
site, read by a million people, is important, whereas a number of blogs that are only
read by 500 people each are basically irrelevant.
But what, we might ask, if there are lots of these blogs - what if there are 10,000
of them? The old-media lens says, 10,000 times nothing is still nothing - they're
still irrelevant, they're just too small. However, if we take a more contemporary
view, where small pebbles can add up to something signifi cant alongside the big
boulders (to borrow a metaphor from Leadbeater
2008
), the 10,000 blogs read by
only 500 people have an 'audience' - to use a now-clumsy term - that add up to fi ve
million people, fi ve times our example BBC number. In terms of which
single
source has the most power, clearly the BBC wins. But in terms of a diverse and
interesting hubbub, the BBC can't compete. And if you look on the production
side - who made the thing and the difference it made in
their
own lives - in the BBC
case you are likely to have two or three employees who have contributed to the
production of a webpage, because it is their job to do so - in terms of human engage-
ment and excitement, that's pretty close to nothing. Compare that with the 10,000
people who are so engaged with a subject, so passionate about it, that they have
bothered to create a diverse array of original content about it, and that's really pow-
erful in itself before we have even started to think about the 'audience'.
