The Future of the Long Tail By Chris Anderson

1. The Future of the Long Tail
Chris Anderson

2. 20th Century Media Giants

3. 21st Century Media Giants

4. Traditional media
Individuals
New media

5. 20th Century Markets
Variety
Popularity

6. 21st Century Markets

9. Amazon’s Tail Gets Longer
Source: Byrnjolfsson, Yu, Smith, MIT

10. Music ratings improve as music gets more niche
10 100 1k 10K
100K 1M Rank Source: Goel, et al, Yahoo

11. The Long Tail is driven by two factors:
1. Increased choice
2. Decreased search costs

12. The Three Rules of the Long Tail
1.If you can lower the cost of creation and/or distribution,
you can offer more stuff/variety
2.“More variety” means the ability to satisfy more minority
taste and address more granular markets
3.There’s a lot of “room at the bottom” and all the most
interesting things come from the most unexpected places
(Example: YouTube)

13. A powerlaw

14. Shown another way

15. WTF?

16. The Missing Market

17. Where has the Long Tail won?
● Advertising (“long tail keywords”)
● Media content (YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, podcasts)
● Ecommerce (Amazon, Taobao, Mercado Libre etc)
● Mobile apps/games
● Social (influencers/“microcelebrity”)
Basically the whole Internet...

19. (“FAANG” = Facebook, Apple,
Amazon, Netflix, Google)

20. The impact of Covid...
● Accelerated shift to e-commerce
● Remote work opens Long Tail of Talent
● Remote teaching opens Long Tail of Education
Anything that moves online
automatically expands to the Long
Tail

21. Source: eMarketer

22. The Long Tail of Talent
People who work for competitors
“Fit”
Number of candidates
People who work elsewhere in the industry
People who went to the “right” schools
People who went to less right schools
People who work in the industry in another country
People who went to school in another country. Etc....
Person who has no
obvious
qualifications but is
nevertheless the
best person in the
world for this job

23. Covid is driving a broadening in the search for talent
Source: Cisco Survey, July 2020
“How will your hiring change as a result of the Pandemic?”

24. ● Online degrees (Universities offering
online degrees, plus Coursera,
Udacity, Udemy, etc)
● Homeschooling
● Hybrid learning (“flipped classroom”)
● Continuing education (mid-career
“upskilling” by self-learning online)
The Long Tail of Education

25. The Long Tail of Education