I recently completed The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine. (btw… I’m a subscriber.) The book provides a unique perspective on a dynamically changing environment that is redefining how people acquire goods and services. This, of course, directly impacts the church because our message is facing significant competition from an almost endless supply of online content. Because of that, it was intriguing to gain Anderson’s insights into what’s happening with the growth of various Internet businesses.
Here are some of the highlights of what I read:
- “Hits are great, but niches are emerging as the big new market.”
- “The story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance–what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.”
- For Netflix, Amazon and Rhapsody, “sales of products not offered by their bricks-and-mortar competitors amounted to between a quarter and nearly half of total revenues…the fastest-growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren’t available in traditional, physical retail stores at all.”
- “Culture has shifted from following the crowd up to the top of the [music] charts to finding your own style and exploring far out beyond the broadcast mainstream.”
- “We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests.”
- “The Internet simply makes it cheaper to reach more people, effectively increasing the liquidity of the market in the Tail. That, in turn, translates to more consumption.”
- “It’s blogging that has really sparked the renaissance of the amateur publisher. Today, millions of people publish daily for an audience that is collectively larger than any single mainstream media outlet can claim.”
- “Google doesn’t try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what’s going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does.”
- “This is the world of ‘peer production,’ the extraordinary Internet-enabled phenomenon of mass volunteerism and amateurism. We are at the dawn of an age where most producers in any domain are unpaid, and the main difference between them and their professional counterparts is simply the (shrinking) gap in the resources available to them to extend the ambition of their work. When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer.”
- “Faith in advertising and the institutions that pay for it is waning, while faith in individuals is on the rise. Peers trust peers. Top-down messaging is losing traction, while bottom-up buzz is gaining power.”
- “In a world of infinite choice, context–not content–is king.”
- “Noise can be a huge problem. Indeed, if left unchecked, noise–random content or products of poor quality–can kill a market. Too much noise and people don’t buy.”
- “If a producer intends something to be absolutely right for one audience, it will, by definition, be wrong for another. The compromises necessary to make something appeal to everyone mean that it will almost certainly not appeal perfectly to anyone.”
- “New things tend to sell better than old things.”
- “We’re also a gregarious species, and sometimes we like to do things together with other people. There’s comfort in numbers, and shared experiences bring us closer.”
- “We’re leaving the watercooler era, when most of us listened, watched, and read from the same, relatively small pool of mostly hit content. And we’re entering the micro-culture era, when we’re all into different things.”
- “Demand will shift to shorter content for convenience and entertainment, and longer content for substance and satisfaction. But the arbitrary middle will not hold.”
- “More information is better, but only when it’s presented in a way that helps order choice, not confuse it further.”
Tony Morgan blogs at TonyMorganLive. Visit Tony’s Amazon store here.
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