The Long Tail: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More Quotes
"The average watchman then had access to a half dozen TV channels, and virtually everyone watched a few or more of the same handful of TV shows."
"The main effect of all this connectivity is unlimited and unfiltered access to culture and content of all sorts, from the mainstream to the farthest fringe of the underground."
"The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes."
"The supermarket helped create the Middle Class. Its low prices freed up substantial funds for families to spend on cars, homes, education, and other needs and amenities of life."
"The arrival of TiVo and other DVRs amplified this dissolution of the watercooler effect by removing the time component as well."
"We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests."
"In a world of almost zero packaging cost and instant access to almost all content in this format, consumers exhibit consistent behavior: They look at almost everything."
"Bringing niches within reach reveals latent demand for noncommercial content."
"What the Internet presented was a way to eliminate most of the physical barriers to unlimited selection."
"Today online shopping has passed catalog shopping and now accounts for about 5 percent of American retail spending."
"The unlimited shelf space of the Web retail allows them to offer their customers more variety and convenience."
"Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail."
"The true shape of demand is revealed only when consumers are offered infinite choice."
"The power of the PC means that the ranks of "producers" have swelled a thousandfold."
"Millions of people now have the capacity to make a short film or album, or publish their thoughts to the world."
"The exposure culture reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything."
"The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but instead, failure to properly attribute authorship."
"The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers."
"For the first time in history, we’re able to measure the consumption patterns, inclinations, and tastes of an entire market of consumers in real time."
"The new tastemakers aren’t a super-elite of people cooler than us; they are us."
"In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king."
"Niches operate by different economics than the mainstream."
"Niche products are, by definition, not for everyone."
"If you offer people a choice of ten things, they will choose one of the ten."
"Cities have such a dense population that the usually widely distributed demand becomes concentrated."
"The shelf reflects the absolute state of the art in retail science."
"Every dimension of the supermarket shelf has been studied, focus-grouped, and observed by retail anthropologists."
"The retail shelf is the frontline of an enterprise that accounts for nearly 60 percent of the American economy."
"We know the precise value gradient of the vertical dimension in a rack of shelves, from top to bottom."
"Stores determine exactly how high a 'slotting fee' they can charge manufacturers to place their products in this purchasing sweet spot."
"The horizontal dimension is a study in optimizing brand exposure."
"Thanks to bar codes and point-of-sale integration with stock replenishment software, we know how to keep shelves filled with the right stuff all the time."
"The shelf is so wasteful in so many ways. Let’s start with the obvious."
"For every square foot of floor space used for shelves, you need another two to three square feet of aisle, checkout, and common space."
"These types of overhead can nearly equal the space costs, bringing the total rent on that twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch square of shelving to at least $50 a month."
"The hidden costs of selling products on shelves can actually be even higher than the direct costs."
"What the VCR and the video rental store hinted at was the rise of the age of infinite choice."
"Every time a new technology enables more choice, whether it’s the VCR or the Internet, consumers clamor for it."
"Choice is simply what we want and, apparently, what we’ve always wanted."
"Instead, eBay is both the Long Tail of products and the Long Tail of merchants."
"EBay is built around the notion of distributed inventory."
"More than 724,000 Americans report that eBay is their primary or secondary source of income."
"The challenge for eBay will be to do the same within its own service."
"KitchenAid is known for the quality of its high-end kitchen appliances, but even more so for the range of colors they come in."
"LEGO has a long history of offering tools online to encourage model trading and other collaborative peer production."
"What iTunes does for music, LEGO Factory is doing for people who like to build."
"Rather than offer his contact management package as a set of discs to be installed on a company’s computers, he ran the software on his own servers."
"The hosted software model offers an opportunity to break through that, by letting professionals deal with most of the complexity."
"The secret to creating a thriving Long Tail business can be summarized in two imperatives: Make everything available. Help me find it."
"Long Tail businesses treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare."
"The virtue of this is that if you know at least the kind of thing you’re looking for, and if you use a focused, fine-sliced aggregator rather than a generalized aggregator, you’ll get better results."
"Hits are as much a part of a powerlaw distribution as are niches. What’s dead is the monopoly of the hit."
"In a Long Tail world many top-down hits get smaller, but even more bottom-up hits get bigger."
"The Long Tail doesn’t promise riches. If what you’re doing has value, it does promise you more attention, reputation, and readership."
"We often think of the Long Tail as a force of fragmentation, but it can be a force for unification for the already fragmented, too."
"Today, as more TV migrates to streaming Web video, we’re about to enter an era where distributed markets are as good as concentrated ones."
"One country’s hits are another country’s niches."
"In the on-demand world of streaming Web video, Long Tail video will reunite diasporas through their common culture."
"The nutshell version of the Long Tail theory: if you can lower the cost of production and distribution, you can offer far more variety."
"For the average blogger or micro-publisher, the Long Tail doesn’t promise riches but more attention and reputation."
"The Long Tail doesn’t cure obscurity, it just diminishes it."