Chris Anderson - The Long Tail (Longer, Rev.&upated ed.)
“Yahoo! music ratings, Google PageRank, MySpace friends, Netflix user reviews - these are all manifestations of the wisdom of the crowd. Millions of regular people are the new tastemakers. Some of them act as individuals, others are parts of groups organized around shared interests, ans still others are simple herds of consumers automatically tracked by software watching their every behavior.”
“In today’s Long Tail markets, the main effect of filters is to help people move from the world they know (“hits”) to the world they don’t know (“niches”) via a route that is both comfortable and tailored to their tastes.”
“In other words, give people unlimited choice and make it easy for them to find what they want, and you discover that demand keeps on going into niches that were never even considered before - instructional videos, karaoke, Turkish TV, you name it. Netflix changed economics of offering niches and, in doing so, reshaped our understanding about what people actually want to watch.”
“Shelves have another disadvantage: They are bound by geography. … For all the time we may spend online, we do, after all, live in physical world.”
“These are some of the other mental traps we fall into because of scarcity thinking:
- Every one wants to be a star
- Everyone’s in it for the money
- If it isn’t a hit, it’s miss
- The only success is mass success
- “Direct video” = bad
- “Self-published” = bad
- “Independent” = “they couldn’t get a deal”
- Amateur = amateurish
- Low-selling = low-quality
- If it were good, it would be popular.”