Anyway, I agree. The Fat Middle is where all the interesting stuff happens, in the middle of the greatest volatility. It’s constantly boiling with rising stars emerging from the Long Tail and fading stars from The Short Head.

Cost to post or write an article: ZERO

Cost to record a song with a few of your friends: A few beers and pizzas and a PC or Mac

Cost to record a quality song: Soundproof room, good mics, etc – maybe $750-1500 – cheap, but not free

Cost to shoot & produce a tv show or an episode or pilot of a show: If independent, still between $20k at the low end, and $6 million at the hight end.

Even $20,000 is a LOT of money.

And the long tail ain’t gonna cut it even for small investors/investments to work in this media space unless the market changes into a place where a distrib orders up digital distribution rights for a property and “buys” UPFRONT a certain number of downloads or streams so the content producer can recoup enough $$ so they can make more.

There’s just no way to compare some fat kid with their video camera to a real film or video storyteller who’s developed their craft through a lot of experience and hard work. Once in a while there will be a break out, but most of the sh*t, will be just that.

You may want to take a look at another take on the “fat belly” this time with some empirical data based on recommendation systems, in a recentpost on my blog, Tagschema.

http://tagschema.com/blogs/tagschema/2006/10/putting-folk-back-in-folksonomy.html

I found this engaging write-up on Giga OM by Robert Young that builds-upon the idea of the Long Tail as described by Chris Anderson.  Chris Anderson has talked about the long tail and the “big head”. Robert Young, a serial entrepr…

Some questions if anyone cares to answer:

1. Is there any agreement as to where the Long Tail starts? (Prof M. Smith says no)
2. Did 40% of Amazon’s sales in the study come from Affiliates? If so, is Long Affiliates just as valid a theory of their success?
3. Did Wal-Mart sell more music CDs than anyone, despite the fact they have a limited inventory & are not long tail sellers? If so, would this be further support of the Long Affiliates theory.
4. Can’t Netflix’s success be attributed to it being a First Mover?

Thanks for any answers.
Our take on the long tail below:

http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/?p=1334
(How Much Does The Long Tail Weigh)

http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/?p=1348
(How Much Does The Long Tail Weigh: Part Deux)

Reminds me of case studies at Haas.

http://www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5

The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation. As an example take Yahoo! Groups.

* 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
* 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
* 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)