After some of the blank stares when the “long tail” was mentioned during Media Week, VC David Hornik’s assertion that it has become short hand might seem a little off but it really is the case within the tech/media communities. No matter how well know it is though, Hornik makes a good point when he says the economics of the “long tail” are misunderstood, particularly the tendency to tout it as the artist’s revolution. His conclusion: “essentially two general classes of technology the will benefit economically from the Long Tail — aggregators and filterers. … The aggregators are those web businesses that seek to collect up as much of the Long Tail content as is possible, so as to make their ‘stores’ a one stop shop for content no matter how popular or obscure. … The filterers are those businesses that make it easier to find the content in which we are interested, despite the increasing proliferation of content creators, hosts, aggregators, etc. The purest form of filterer is the search engine. But the more obscure the content, the less effective the generalized search engine will be.”
Do you agree?
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post