Chris Anderson – The Long Tail

The main argument of his theory is…Lots of small grossing films One large grossing blockbuster

……If you add up all the revenue from Niche market films the profit can be greater than or equal to the profit from one blockbuster or best selling product.

Pre broadband Niche products were hard to find and expensive to buy, now online shopping/sharing makes it easy to cater for everyone's taste.

Chris Anderson introduces his theory here:

• Chris Anderson - Introducing The Long Tail - CWF08 - 06 – YouTube

“A few had a lot, a lot had a few”

What do you think he means by this? Try and make some notes from the video.

Main points broken down:

• 20th century – we didn’t have the technology to see what was really taking place, we couldn’t tell what consumers were really buying or demanding.

• So we assumed that store figures alone reflected what we wanted.

• But the stores only offer limited products, mostly best sellers, due to the limited shelf space and desire to make a lot of profit.

• Maybe what consumers wanted wasn’t in the stores…….

Main points broken down:

• 21st century – we can now see a more accurate view of our tastes as technology to monitor consumerism improves.

• The internet has the capacity to ‘store’ a wider variety of products. Both the niche products and the best sellers.

• So we can see consumers buy a mixture of both

Main points broken down:

• So we can now see what was invisible before, that consumers all like something that is niche.

• Collectively the many niche purchases of several different products, make up the same amount as the lower amount of purchases of only a few best selling products.

Main conclusion

• So consumers have always wanted niche products that were not being offered to them.

• They could only consume the mainstream that was offered by conglomerates.

• The internet has now enabled us to access a massive variety of desires through sites such as Amazon and Play, that we could not access before.

Here is a visual representation:

This was all we were aware of in the 20th C

This section was invisible to us before the new technology of the 21st century