Chris Anderson (writer)
Editor-in-chief of Wired, which has won a National Magazine Award for general excellence three times during his tenure.
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For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.
A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.
We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing.
Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory.
For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.
Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.
Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating.
Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions.
Broadly, the Long Tail is about abundance. Abundant shelf space, abundant distribution, abundant choice.
The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers.
Talent is not universal but it is widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge.
In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distributions, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air.
Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to becoming mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a thousand little indulgences that sets us apart from others.
The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another.
In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king. (Chris Anderson quoting Rob Reid)
This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation.
We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests.
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