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)

1. creatives (1%)
2. contributors (19%)
3. consumers (80%)

In the Netscape/reddit/digg world:

a) The creatives are the ones who put in stories.
b) The contributors are the ones who add comments and vote.
c) The consumers are the ones who just ride on the work of the first two groups.

In order to get the consumers (the 80%) you need the creatives and contributors (the 1% and 19%).

In order to get the contributors (the 19%) you need the creatives (the 1%).

In order to get the 1% you need to motivate them somehow.

At Netscape we motivated them with compensation, recognition, and affiliation.
At digg they motivated them with recognition and affiliation.

Netscape is building the 19% right now, and in many ways we are an anomaly since we started with a large amount of traffic due to Netscape’s heritage. We brought in the 1% and they are doing an amazing job. We’ve got the 80% covered, and we right now we’ve been building up–and frankly educating–that 19% on what social news even is.

People in the web 2.0 bubble forget exactly how niche what we do is. The mass audience doesn’t understand what social news and bookmarking is. It’s gonna take another 2-3 years for them to figure it out. Just like it took 3-4 years for blogging to stick. However, I’ve seen this story before and it comes to resolution quickly.

Of that 19% we need to get I’d say we already have 1/3rd of them, and by the end of the year we’ll have the other 2/3rds. You can’t build a community overnight, it takes time. I have to say, that I’m thrilled we got to 50,000+ registered members in < 2 months. We’re adding well over 1,000 a day and growing–we’re way ahead of our plan.

SimonG… you’re right. I probably should have put up a diagram. And I will include one when I write a follow-up piece that focuses further on my Fat Belly thesis.

Seth… hope my follow-up clarifies the confusion.

Greg… while I can see why you may think I have the distribution curves mixed up, I am indeed talking about a power law curve.

Adam… I actually wrote my piece before Brad Feld’s post (it’s just that Om held onto it for a few days before running it). I just read it, and we do seem to be saying similar things.

Before I end, let me say one more thing. An example that Chris Anderson likes to use with his theory is the sales distribution of books at Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble, as they relate to bestsellers and the long tail. For me, it was interesting to find out that in the case of B&N, about 5% of sales are derived from bestsellers. The vast majority (more than 60%) of sales is what I would consider Fat Belly (by authors who are relatively well-known, but never quite make it onto the bestseller list). In fact, a key reason their superstores carry up to 200,000 titles is to capture the Fat Belly.

http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/001937.html

That said, I would hazard a guess that this ‘Fat Belly’ concept may also apply to eBay sellers

A few ‘Power sellers’ with very high feedback selling lots of stuff, followed by the ‘middle class’, folks with medium feedback accounting for the bulk of the sales and then the long tail of low feedback sellers

A) A very small percentage of the userbase generates a very large portion of the stories.

B) Of those stories, a very small percentage are extremely popular, and others are moderately popular.

It then seems to say that if you added up the popularity of all the moderately popular stories, it would far exceed the few superpopular stories, therefore – MIDDLE CLASS, etc. etc. However, that’s meaningless.

Or may it’s that the value of a superstar isn’t in the huge salary he or she commands, it’s in the large number of people willing to pay to see the superstar, therefore being a superstar is really a proof of democracy. Which is quite twisted.

The theory is that the super-diggers have an above-average ability to create appealing posts, and that’ll hold whether it’s done at digg or netscape. There’s nothing democratic or middle-class about that idea.