Most content online, including this episode, exists in a Long Tail of unpopular content that contains most of the material online. Let me explain.

Topics:

• Lately I have come to the conclusion that I am living in the Long Tail of the Internet, and should learn to accept that.
• The term “Long Tail” was coined by Chris Anderson, while writing for Wired Magazine.
• In his seminal 2006 book on the topic “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” Chris Anderson describes the Long Tail as a theory that in the digital age, the focus of businesses is shifting from a small number of "hit" products to a vast number of niche items.
• This shift is primarily driven by the Internet, which has significantly lowered the costs of production and distribution, making it economically viable to offer a much wider selection of goods.
• At the heart of the theory is the idea of a demand curve.
  • The "head" of the curve represents a few popular, mainstream products that sell in large volumes.
  • The "long tail," in contrast, consists of a multitude of less popular, niche products that individually sell in small quantities.
• Anderson's central argument is that the cumulative sales of these niche products in the long tail can equal or even exceed the sales of the blockbuster hits in the head.
• Now in my opinion, the Long Tail theory fits perfectly for online content also, if we replace the term “niche product” with “niche content”, and the Long Tail of Internet content is made up of vast amounts of such niche content.
• And frankly speaking, I have been living in that Long Tail for a very long time.
• Back in 2001 when I started to write online, the term "weblog" or in its abbreviated form "blog" had just been coined by Jorn Barger a few years earlier in 1997.
• The terms "podcasting" was yet to be coined by Ben Hammersley in an article he wrote in the Guardian in 2004.
• Back then, nobody was producing video or even audio content, as hardly anyone had broadband connections to download or stream such high-bandwidth content.
• So, we wrote.
• And what we wrote was indexed by search engines, which were actually useful for our readers to find.
• In those days, I would easily get 500+ unique visitors to my blog each day. Now, I would be lucky to get 50.
• Blogging died for me, so I moved to social media.
• Social media died for me, so I moved to podcasting.
• Podcasting died for me, so I moved to YouTube.
• I think you get the picture: unless you are already coming from a huge brand, be it personal or commercial, it is very hard to break out of the Long Tail and move left on Anderson’s graph.
• In that graph, we have the popularity of content on the y-axis, and the content itself along the x-axis. To the left, we have less content that is highly popular, to the right we have more content that is not.

• The vast majority of online content producers, including me, operate small channels that are on the right side of this graph, the Long Tail.
• We produce the majority of content collectively, but receive tiny amounts of traffic individually.
• Algorithms from companies like YouTube or Spotify have yet to break this pattern, in fact they seem to encourage it.
• Obviously the economics of this equation are terrible for those of us living in the Long Tail, but I suspect most of us stopped caring about that a long time ago, or otherwise quit.
• Personally, I make these episodes because I enjoy it, and could not care less about building a big audience.
• The most interesting content online is to the found in the Long Tail, the more obscure the niche, the better in my honest opinion.
• A small audience means you are beholden to nobody, and a lack of a commercial brand behind your content provides far more freedom to express yourself.
• I’ll keep going.

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techleaderpro-2025-week-38.mp3

File details: 6.9 MB MP3, 5 mins 10 secs duration.

Title music is "Apparent Solution" by Brendon Moeller, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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