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The Long Tail
longtail.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
The Long Tail is Chris Anderson's blog, former Wired editor, about long tail economics, free business models, and web startups.
What HN saysHN links it for Anderson's responses to critiques of the long tail idea, including the HBR piece, and for his survey of free business models.
29HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
47stories submitted
247story points
8 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Excellent HBR piece challenging the Long Tail3 people · 12 points · first shared 2008 · 9 comments on HN
- 2Terrific survey of free business models online2 people · 26 points · first shared 2009 · 4 comments on HN
- 3Finding a Freemium model that works for you2 people · 5 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 4About2 people · first shared 2007
- 5Do Something New Every Three Years1 people · 22 points · first shared 2008 · 4 comments on HN
- 6Chris Anderson (Wired Editor) explains plagiarism charges1 people · 19 points · first shared 2009 · 11 comments on HN
- 7Importance of 'Spare Cycles' for Web 2.0 startups1 people · 17 points · first shared 2007 · 3 comments on HN
- 8Dear Malcolm: Why so threatened?1 people · 12 points · first shared 2009 · 10 comments on HN
- 9The miraculous power of scale1 people · 12 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 10The rise of "retail blogs"1 people · 11 points · first shared 2008 · 3 comments on HN
- 11On Free: a flight across Europe for five pounds is indistinguishable from magic1 people · 9 points · first shared 2007 · 3 comments on HN
- 12Free is more complicated than you think1 people · 9 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 13A business model for open source hardware1 people · 9 points · first shared 2009 · 3 comments on HN
- 14Thirteen words that lose their meaning when the denominator approaches infinity1 people · 6 points · first shared 2008 · 12 comments on HN
- 15Open source is a company; social media is a country1 people · 5 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
matchagaucho · 2018-10-01
Classic long-tail pattern.
The growth of superstars makes me optimistic enough to look at ETF funds like GAMR. The industry overall seems undervalued.
http://www.longtail.com/about.html
davidmathers · 2009-05-21
He admitted so on his own blog.
I remember him saying that the new data didn't really change anything and explaining why the long tail idea was still valid.
edit: This is what I was thinking of: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/06/excellent-hbr-p.html
So in the data she cites, the head of the online music market represents 32% of the all plays, and the tail represents 68%. That's certainly no challenge to the Long Tail theory; indeed, it's even more tail-heavy than the data I cited in my book (probably because I used a more generous estimate of 50,000 tracks for Wal-Mart's inventory).
cawel · 2008-07-13
I didn't like the subtitle though: Why Chris Anderson's theory of the digital world might be all wrong.
Anderson explains on this blog (http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/06/excellent-hbr-p.html ) that Elberse uses different definitions for 'tail' and 'head'. So it's all about definitions, rather than having posited wrong claims.
The article's author never disproves Anderson's theory. So it's a bold statement to say it might be all wrong.
Emore · 2009-05-30
According to Wired's Chris Anderson it's all but dead. His coming book is about this very subject, called "FREE". Until the release, take a look at this article (and video clip) by Anderson himself: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free, or at his own blog (which lately have been featuring several articles about "free"): http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/05/my_next_book_fr.html
mjfern · 2009-05-08
A few resources you might find useful on business/revenue models:
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/03/terrific-survey-of-free-…
http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/01/three-freemium-strat…
zokiboy · 2009-02-02
To cheer things a bit, here are some higher numbers:
Flickr: 5-10%
Ning: 3%
Online free-to-play games: up to 25%
TurboTax Online: 70% (!!)
Source: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-w.html
My opinion: it depends on a lot of factors. From my experience without much effort you can get 1% users convert. But like I said there a lot of variables that can mess it up or down.
jacobscott · 2008-09-12
Chris Anderson's article on Free in Wired is six months old but probably a good reference if you haven't seen it:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all
I guess his book isn't out yet but it looks like he's blogging about free @ the long tail:
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/
bootload · 2007-05-28
'... Some say that the bubble is fully inflated once journalists start launching startups. ...'
I wish journo's would do some basic fact checking (still requires verification though). Clearly from his about page '... background is in science, starting with studying physics and doing research at Los Alamos and culminating in six years at the two leading scientific journals, Nature & Science...' ~http://www.longtail.com/about.html
mbrubeck · 2012-09-28
It's less common but hardly unprecedented.
1. Charles Stross (one of the four examples above) used to point readers to BitTorrent for his free book downloads: http://web.archive.org/web/20090514034859/http://www.antipope.org/char… (And he complains about automated scanners flagging legit files as copyright violations: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/imbeciles.html )
2. Unni Drougge use The Pirate bay to post a torrent of an audio version of her best-selling novel: http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1029.html
3. Larry Lessig releases his book "Free Culture" as a torrent: http://lessig.org/blog/2004/03/free_culture_is.html (And of course, a USC student had his network account disabled for downloading this completely legal torrent: http://boingboing.net/2006/08/25/universities-put-hol.html )
4. Dan Morrill posts a torrent link to his book about selling e-books: http://torrentfreak.com/my-book-please-081017/
5. Megan Lisa Jones self-publishes a novel through BitTorrent: http://ibla.us/2011/content/thoughts-on-the-bittorrent-promotion-and-m…
6. Caris O'Malley posts a pirate torrent link of his own novel and encourages readers to download it: http://hipsterlibrarian.com/2011/08/04/illegally-download-the-egg-said…
7. Wired editor Chris Anderson links to a torrent search for his book "The Long Tail": http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/books_want_to_b.html