Muses of Murari

Now a days, I am reading more and more, non-fiction books. Now, this book, I have selected, when I dropped in Landmark, talks on niche markets, that are served well by Internet, which otherwise, could not be accessed well. The title of the book or its blurb or the praise on the book covers, did not influenced my buying. And also this book is not even a runaway best seller. But, true to its title, it is niche book, which could be low ranked in terms of popularity. This book authored by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, speaks his theory/observation – the Long Tail.

In the sales graph, drawn sales numbers against the commodities like movies, music or books ranked, one can see, the popular ones occupy huge spikes in left side of graph. The curve starts to dip with low ranking, and the tail of the curve contniue to drag and interestingly never reaches zero. This means, we have huge number of non-popular music, books, movies, which never cease to get sold. But they get sold, in small numbers. If huge number of commodities, sell in single digits every month or quarter, which will itself earns any company, a good profit and sometimes earns more than what mainstream popular ones do. This is made more possible than ever, only due to internet, the author argues.

This is a good observation. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody, harped on to this theory and reaping the benefits. The author went on to explain, with some real time examples, his theory of how we are swammed with lot of choices and the tools to filter them and given the echaustive list of niche products that are aligned with tastes of individuals. Author also explained the retail stores and how they have many (physical) disadvantages and can’t come close to what their online counterparts can think of or do. For example, Amazon’s ingeniuos strategy to list the local vendors’ products in a centralised website, which not only helps the customer to have a look at exhaustive list, but also helps vendors to reach the customers near & far. And also reduces the massive inventory overhead. 

Author talks about the wide variety of choice, which is driving the individual to look for the niche books, niche music or niche movies. The blockbusters or best sellers are no more the reasons for must-watch or must-see, since, we have huge system in place, to get the information and pocess logistics to select some obscure book or not heard-of movie, of individual tastes and preferences. And also on the power of recommendation, from the fans and how the fan following can make or break the product or services on internet.

Anderson discusses that this medium, is world of amateurs. Amateurs of many and many things. He points out amateurs’ contributions can some times successful, stating examples like online encyclopedia Wikipedia and amatuer astronomers. The examples are lucid and to the point. He demystifies the idea of “too much choice” problem. If we are to pick up some exotic jam, among 250 types of jam in a store, we might some times don’t choose the jam at all, which might like. The author argues, that this is not problem of choosing over a lot of variety, but, the problem of not sufficient tools to search over. It is limitation and not a rule. He observers, if were to choose something over the internet site, like say for example, searching some book on obscure topic in Amazon, we not only retrieve the book we want, we also get information on the books, of the same type. This is a truly advantage of doing business online.

The main concept about the book, is the long tail. The hundreds and thousands of low ranked numbers, books & movies need not necessarily be low quality. There are many low ranked, that might interest many, many people. These products might never seen the light, if the internet were not to play the role, it is doing now. People, now have huge amount of information and also tools to filter them and to choose according to their individual tastes and preferences. This group, has a huge potential to grow. A big business can built around this group. This is what companies like Netflix, Rhapsody doing, the author points out.

The book is full of facts, concepts, articulated with simple graphs and offers a very good read, provided the area of your interests fall into internet or economics or business or just being a open minded book reader. This book, I got introduced to this book, in some blog post, which I don’t remember, and also the book is not that much popular, like, unlike massively popular book, The Da Vinci Code. Still, I could find it, some how using internet (blogs), that it fits my taste. And also read somewhere, that it got tremendous response, both in terms of reviews & sales. This is what the Long Tail, is all about!

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