Google CEO Eric Schmidt counters the notion of the long tail (via Whimsley):
although the tail is very interesting and we enable it, the vast majority of the revenue remains in the head. And this a lesson that businesses have to learn. While you can have a long tail strategy, you better have a head, because that’s where all the revenue is. a very short Head of Long Tail aggregators: Amazon, iTunes, Google and their kin dominate their markets to a blockbuster-like degree.
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, responds noting the “irony” that:
a very short Head of Long Tail aggregators: Amazon, iTunes, Google and their kin dominate their markets to a blockbuster-like degree. … [N]ew research from McKinsey suggests that this sort of radical inequality is increasingly the norm as markets get more networked. ”Powerlaws do imply wildly unequal distributions of money, power, celebrity and everything else.” So much for “democratization.” And it’s not just companies. The Long Tail – the powerlaw created by network effects – may be creating super-celebrity,
Whimsley concludes: “There’s more, and he holds on to some of his assertions, but basically, it’s all over for the long tail.”
We have been looking closely at the geography of creative industries and occupations. You get exactly this pattern of a big fat huge head (that is extreme geographic concentration in two super-celebrity markets – New York and L.A.), a dramatic fall-off after that, the emergence of one or two specialized nodes (Nashville in music, D.C. in media, Las Vegas in dancers, and so on) and then some gentle dispersion among much smaller centers in the tail. We see this pattern of a biruficated, barbell-like spatial structure popping up in the geography of these and other creative industries and occupations. More to come…