The Long Tail

by Chris Anderson

  Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views, I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.

  As much as the blockbuster era seems like the natural state of things, it is, as we’ve seen, mostly an artifact of late-twentieth-century broadcast technologies. Before then most culture was local; in the future it will be affinity-based and massively parallel. Mass culture may fade, but common culture will not. We will still share our culture with others, but not with everyone.

  12

  THE INFINITE SCREEN

  VIDEO AFTER TELEVISION

  “TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

  —David Foster Wallace

  Nobody thought the future of television would look like this. On October 15, 2005, an eight-month-old startup called YouTube unveiled the ultimate Long Tail marketplace of the moving image. Apple’s iTunes’ polished video store may have had far more network TV content, but YouTube let anyone upload their videos for free and let anyone instantaneously view them by simply clicking on a big play button.

  The result was predictably messy, a near-random collection of everything from banned commercials to baby videos. But it was a glimpse into a world of infinite variety, where commercial and amateur video content compete head to head…and the amateurs often win.

  On any given day the first YouTube page, with its most popular videos of the moment, said it all. In the rows of thumbnails you could find clips of commercial content (from The Colbert Report to Britney Spears’s missteps) intermixed with short clips of dumb dogs, funny commercials, and an octopus eating a shark (which was amazing, by the way). And on the next page and the next and beyond, there was more of the same: snowboarding wipeouts, funny songs, and people playing video games very, very well.

  By Spring 2006, users were uploading 100,000 videos a day to YouTube and viewers were watching around 100 million clips daily, either on the site itself or in “embedded” YouTube players on third-party sites such as blogs. That’s five million hours of video watching a day, which put YouTube at about the viewership of a medium-sized TV network. No wonder that Google bought the company in late 2006 for $1.65 billion.

  Today Google Video and YouTube have become the distribution channel of choice for not just the Long Tail of content producers but also studios and networks trying to reach a new audience.

  Broadcast networks can make Google Video a storefront for their archives, or just a place to host teasers of upcoming shows. It’s already becoming a resource for the Indian diaspora, which can now find Hindi shows that are only broadcast on the subcontinent (legality: suspect). And indie filmmakers can now find out if anyone wants to pay $12 (or $3 for a day pass) to watch their masterpieces. Not having distribution is no longer an excuse for obscurity.

  Meanwhile Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and a host of others have started their own video marketplaces. The biggest of these sites now rival mainstream TV. Yahoo!’s music video viewership would put it between MTV and VH1 in audience share. More people watch the most popular Jon Stewart segments online than see them live. Popular online video shows, such as Tiki Bar TV, are routinely watched by several hundred thousand people a day, which puts their viewership on a par with good-sized cable TV shows.

  MSNBC’s The Abrams Report, with a multimillion-dollar budget and a crew of dozens, was at the time of this writing watched by an average of 215,000 homes per day. Rocketboom, a Jon Stewart–like comedy news program created online by exactly two people for the cost of some videotapes, two lights, and a cardboard map, was watched by 200,000 homes per day over the same period. Now it’s selling advertising and got $40,000 for the five thirty-second spots in its first week. Not quite as high as broadcast TV revenues, perhaps, but the networks would kill for those margins. (And, of course, Rocketboom host and co-owner Amanda Congdon was lured to ABC in the summer of 2006.)

  This day has been predicted for a decade, but it took the mainstreaming of broadband for it to finally arrive. A generation that grew up online and developed its media consumption habits in the bandwidth paradise of American university dorm rooms is now totally comfortable watching video on a computer screen. Increasingly, though, they don’t have to. The home networking boom is connecting broadband to the living room, and network TiVos, other digital video recorders, and broadband-connect video-game consoles such as the Xbox 360 are bringing online content to ordinary TVs.

  It’s easy to dismiss the random junk on YouTube as little threat to The Sopranos. After all, distribution is not the only barrier to entering TV: production costs are a hurdle, too. It takes more than a digital video camera to produce CSI, and only the economics of mainstream media can support elaborate dramas such as Lost. But there is an audience for less-produced fare that can be made at a fraction of the cost of traditional TV programming. Don’t just think America’s Funniest Home Videos, writ large. Think local sports and narrow interests; cool commercials you choose to watch and presentations from conferences you wish you could have attended.

  Blogger Thomas Hawk explains:

  If today I watch CSI Miami, but on my weekends go out hang gliding and am a huge hang gliding fan, when the California hang gliding championships end up being broadcast through a microcontent platform I will end up watching that instead of CSI.

  If today I watch some network television but even more than my network television I love reading author Hunter S. Thompson, and my microcontent platform brings me a talk by Hunter S. Thompson from the University of Wyoming I will end up watching that instead of CSI.

  If I am 16 and my favorite band is not what hits the charts but rather the latest skate punk music thing, then the custom skate punk music shows that can easily be created and delivered to my microcontent platform will be much more interesting to me than American Idol.

  Today, TV viewership of eighteen-to thirty-four-year-old males, the most coveted demographic for advertisers, has peaked and is beginning to decline, as the more interactive charms of Internet and video games win the competition for eyeballs. Overall TV viewership is at all-time highs, so it’s not panic time in broadcast land yet. But the day when the Internet becomes a real rival to TV appears near. The question is what to do about it.

  A TAIL FOR THE TAKING

  As your thumb clicks through your several hundred digital cable channels, TV may appear anything but shackled. Yet it is. What seems like everything imaginable is instead a very thin slice of the video world. The existing channel structure mostly rewards focused programming with enough depth to fill a 24/7 window every day of the year. So the DIY channel and History Channel en Español now pass muster, but the Halo 2 Physics Hacks channel or the Cool Robots channel does not. An acceptable loss, you say? How about last year’s great season of Project Runway on Bravo, long ago overwritten by your DVR to save space, or never recorded in the first place?

  Today both the channel-centric reality and the ephemeral nature of TV are artifacts of the distribution bottleneck of cable broadcast. TV is still in the era of limited shelf space, while the lesson of the Long Tail is that more is almost always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and in the size of the potential microaudiences for anything and everything. TiVo may have helped by at least taking the tyranny of time out of the equation, but we are nowhere near the iTunes model of being able to download everything ever made, anytime.

  Of all the traditional media industries, television is now the industry with the greatest potential to be transformed by Long Tail forces. Here’s why:

  TV produces more content than any other med
ia and entertainment industry. There are an estimated 31 million hours of original television content produced each year. Although that isn’t as much as radio, most radio is either chat or recorded music that is available elsewhere, so it’s not in the same league. In addition, 115 million digital videotapes are sold each year for personal camcorders. The amount of video produced each year is staggering, but…

  Only a tiny fraction of it is available to you. First, the average American household now gets one hundred channels of TV. While that sounds like a lot—it’s 876,000 hours of video broadcast to the average home each year—that’s still less than 10 percent of the video that’s broadcast in the United States (when you include the 400-plus national channels available on high-capacity satellite and digital networks, and all the local programming across the country). Making matters much worse, unless that home has a DVR (and only about 15 percent of U.S. households do) and someone is spending a good chunk of their free time scouring listings to program it, they’re going to miss virtually all of that TV. Once TV is missed, it’s usually gone. Only a tiny fraction of shows are syndicated, and an even smaller fraction make it to DVD.

  Thus the ratio of produced content to available content is higher than in any other industry. Other industries may produce more content—print, for instance—but it’s far more available (see Google). Only television treats its premium content as disposable. True, a lot of it actually is. But not all, and not as much as is effectively thrown away after a brief moment in the sun.

  There is no shortage of smart people thinking about how TV can find its way out of its corner. But it’s not easy. For starters, most of the networks are content renters, not content owners. This means that the archives are often not theirs to capitalize on.

  Even for those who do own the content, releasing video in ways not anticipated at the original time of broadcast still can be remarkably difficult. Rights are a total hairball, made even more complicated by exclusive regional distribution deals (which conflict with the Internet’s global nature) and syndication options. And then there’s the music in the video, which is even worse. Want to know why you can’t watch old WKRP in Cincinnati episodes on DVD? Because the sitcom was based in a radio station, which had loads of classic rock playing in the background. It’s too expensive and difficult to license the music that was used in the show. (Indeed, that show is considered one of the hardest popular TV shows of all to clear; it’s the lead standard against which all other clearance challenges are considered.) Other classic shows, such as Married…with Children, are released to DVD with different music than in their broadcast incarnations, annoying fans.

  TV OUTSIDE THE BOX

  But there is another class of video, one designed from the start to be distributed on the Internet. This sort of video—the product of the spread of digital camcorders and desktop animation tools—has few such legal encumbrances. Created from scratch to be streamed for free online, it’s already proving to be the richest, most entrepreneurial source of programming for a post-broadcast age.

  Consider Barrio305, a Web-only television service for “reggaeton” music videos, interviews, and urban Latin culture. “Think MTV…but in Spanglish,” says its cofounder, Noah Otalvaro. Each day it streams about 50,000 minutes of video to 5,000 unique users. That’s tiny by television standards (reggaeton isn’t for everyone), but what’s interesting is how it could grow.

  The site is built on a video distribution “platform” created by Brightcove. What that means is that Otalvaro and his brothers don’t have to figure out a way to stream the video to their users; they just publish the video like a blog post and Brightcove takes care of the distribution. Even better, if other sites want to use Barrio305’s content, they can simply copy some HTML code onto their pages and they, too, will have streaming video. Notably, Barrio305 gets the ad revenues from the greater viewership.

  Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove’s founder, describes the effect:

  Just as consumers flocked to the Internet despite the hiccups of dialup modems and clunky Web pages, they will flock to this new medium that empowers them in ways that no single company or industry can replicate. They will come to forget that their relationship to video programming used to be mediated by a black box connected to their TV set, and instead will enjoy the same degree of freedom that they have in consuming and using the text Web from any personal computer.

  Most importantly, the massive economies of scale and reach that the Internet already provides will extend to the realm of video production, where producing and self-distributing a video program is nearly as effortless as producing a Web site, and where millions of new producers and programmers are born.

  Or as Gregg Spiradellis, the cofounder of the hugely popular Web animation site JibJab, puts it: “The Audience is the Network.”

  SHORTER, FASTER, SMALLER

  The first thing you notice about the content of Google Video or Barrio305, aside from the near-total absence of production polish, is that most of it is three minutes long or shorter. Which is not a length often found on broadcast TV, the land of the half-hour increment (or twenty-two minutes once you take out commercials). Instead, it’s something new—a medium that lies somewhere between passive television watching and interactive Web surfing.

  When you think about it, there’s nothing magical about half hours; they’re simply an easy way to divide a broadcast programming schedule into segments that start and finish on the hour. Outside of the broadcast schedule, entertainment and news comes in all sorts of lengths, from thirty-second clips to three-hour concerts; there’s no inherent premium on thirty minutes.

  Like so many other conventions that we today accept as cultural choice, the rigid programming convention of producing video in multiples of thirty minutes is actually an artifact of inefficient distribution. Someday, that convention may fade away, replaced by a range of more natural lengths of video content that reflect the diversity of human attention spans and content types, not network programming convenience and advertiser priorities.

  This is yet another example of the sometimes surprising implications of the shift from scarcity to abundance in distribution; it’s also an example of how ingrained scarcity thinking is in our culture. The shift to broadband video and the severing of the link with fixed schedules will have the effect of making the average programming length shorter. Suddenly, it’s about what we want; not what the distribution channel wants.

  By the same token, the rise of mobile video, starting with the video iPod and video-enabled mobile phones, will be accompanied by short-form content meant to be watched in moments snatched between other things—on the bus, waiting for a friend, during a break from work. Sports, in particular, could be sliced into dozens of new lengths: full games, highlights, key quarters/innings, last two minutes, and so on.

  I suspect that the thirty-minute show is the newspaper of television—a format born of distribution scarcity that is now past its prime. Demand will shift to shorter content for convenience and entertainment, and longer content for substance and satisfaction. But the arbitrary middle will not hold.

  HOLLYWOOD @ HOME

  The other form of video that will be transformed in a Long Tail world is movies. There, too, we’ve seen disruptive change before. One of the greatest shifts from mass to niche culture happened in the early 1980s with the introduction of the VCR and, more important, the video rental store. Before then, the selection of films available to a middle-class American on any given night was the three to four movies playing on broadcast TV, plus whatever local theaters happened to be featuring.

  The advent of video rentals essentially placed thousands of movies on offer in every living room on every night. The result was a transition from pushed media (whether pushed onto the airwaves or into the local theaters) to pulled media. Consumers were suddenly empowered to summon movies with a degree of whim and freedom that, just a few decades before, Walt Disney himself couldn’t possibly have imagined.

  This huge expansion in s
election was accompanied by a major shift in movie access pricing. Where before the standard was one person, one ticket, now there was one small price for as many people as you could cram into your house. This transition was loathed and resisted long before it was grudgingly accepted and finally embraced by Hollywood interests. (Recall the early attempts to sell movies at retail for $70 to $80—a price that was calculated based on the amount of money a typical family would pay at the box office to see their favorite movie two to three times.)

  Rob Reid, who founded the early digital music service Listen.com, describes the economic implications of this shift:

  In the early 80’s, technology enabled the basic unit of consumption for a viewer-selected movie to shift from a night out to a night in—a situation that positively screamed for the “release” of a vast array of movie choices to saturate this new domain of demand. The Night In is a lower-budget affair, but boy are there a lot of them.

  Initially, Hollywood was convinced that it was practically un-American for a family of five to pay less than $20 to see a movie of its choosing (as opposed to a movie of CBS’s choosing, which was of course free—if you assume that 30–40 minutes of commercials can be endured at no cost to the psyche). As a result, the studios believed (wrongly, as it happened) that pricing and margin at the micro-level should be analyzed by matching a given consumer to the price paid to access a given piece of media—rather than the raw amount of time and money the consumer devotes to your products in the aggregate.

  In other words, the studios were horrified when they realized that a family of five (no, not four—remember, this was the eighties) that paid $20 to see ET: The Extraterrestrial in the theater would never drop $20 on ET rentals. What they missed was twofold: Most obviously, the aggregate amount of time and money that a given family would direct toward movies was primed to explode when the family could access any movie they wanted, rather than whatever was being marketed that month; less obviously, they neglected to consider that the total amount of money ET could draw might similarly explode as the film started reaching the unknown millions who would not pay $20 to see ET but might pay, say, $2.95.