LONG TAIL (CON)

” class=”glossaryLink ” style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-left-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline: 0px; color: rgb(225, 18, 42); text-decoration: none !important;”>idea, claims that an individual creative — blogger or musician say — can scrape along and subsist in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, by attracting a 1000 raving fans who buy everything he/she puts out (blogs, books, special editions, t-shirts, mousepads; 1000 raving fans times $100 per year per fan is a $100,000 income). Kelly’s original adjective is a less-objectionable “true” rather than “raving” but “raving has caught on, and the intended meaning is the same.

This basic model of creative capital is just not believable for two reasons. First, it reduces a prosumer/co-creation economic-cultural environment to a godawful unthinking bleating-sheep model of community. I try to imagine my blog, for instance, as the focal point of a stoned army of buy-anything idiot groupies, and fail utterly. I would not want to serve such a community, and I don’t believe it can really form around what I do. I certainly refuse to sell ribbonfarm.com swag.

The second problem is the tacit assumption that creation is prototypically organized in units of 1. The argument is seductive. The bad old corporations will die, along with its committees of groupthink. The brave new solo free agent, wandering in the woods of cultural anarchy, finds a way to lead his tribe to the promised land of whatever his niche is about. “Tribe” is a related problematic term that Seth Godin recently ran amok with.

The reason Kelly (and others like Godin) ends up here is that he 

I came to this place for answers ?

Answers abound depending on the number of users of a compatible productBut when the product becomes incompatible there’s only solutions in search of a problem ?

So we have all these ready made answers that are frankly by now boring and annoying while the questions are morphing in 4D and let’s be honest, our brains don’t understand how to look for anything more.

Instead everyone seems to be looking for something where it is easiest to lookWith a sense of urgency that comes from a bureaucratic fixation on meeting arbitrary deadlines so stuff can be checked off a list and tallied as ‘accomplished’.

(Source:

https://threader.app/thread/1378568479947718658)

LONG TAIL (CON)

If an idea is fully formed, it’s probably someone else’s

— Films (@SuperExisten) September 21, 2021

” class=”glossaryLink ” style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-left-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline: 0px; color: rgb(225, 18, 42); text-decoration: none !important;”>idea, claims that an individual creative — blogger or musician say — can scrape along and subsist in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, by attracting a 1000 raving fans who buy everything he/she puts out (blogs, books, special editions, t-shirts, mousepads; 1000 raving fans times $100 per year per fan is a $100,000 income). Kelly’s original adjective is a less-objectionable “true” rather than “raving” but “raving has caught on, and the intended meaning is the same.

This basic model of creative capital is just not believable for two reasons. First, it reduces a prosumer/co-creation economic-cultural environment to a godawful unthinking bleating-sheep model of community. I try to imagine my blog, for instance, as the focal point of a stoned army of buy-anything idiot groupies, and fail utterly. I would not want to serve such a community, and I don’t believe it can really form around what I do. I certainly refuse to sell ribbonfarm.com swag.

The second problem is the tacit assumption that creation is prototypically organized in units of 1. The argument is seductive. The bad old corporations will die, along with its committees of groupthink. The brave new solo free agent, wandering in the woods of cultural anarchy, finds a way to lead his tribe to the promised land of whatever his niche is about. “Tribe” is a related problematic term that Seth Godin recently ran amok with.

The reason Kelly (and others like Godin) ends up here is that he 

I came to this place for answers ?

Answers abound depending on the number of users of a compatible productBut when the product becomes incompatible there’s only solutions in search of a problem ?

So we have all these ready made answers that are frankly by now boring and annoying while the questions are morphing in 4D and let’s be honest, our brains don’t understand how to look for anything more.

Instead everyone seems to be looking for something where it is easiest to lookWith a sense of urgency that comes from a bureaucratic fixation on meeting arbitrary deadlines so stuff can be checked off a list and tallied as ‘accomplished’.

(Source:

https://threader.app/thread/1378568479947718658)

” class=”glossaryLink ” style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-left-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline: 0px; color: rgb(225, 18, 42); text-decoration: none !important;”>answers my question “after the dream team, what?” with “individuals break away, brand themselves and become individual innovators.” Kinda like Justin Timberlake leaving N’Sync. A dream team of 12, in this view, turns into 12 soloists. Not that he ignores groups, but his focus is on the individual.

Why 150? That’s the Dunbar number. The most people you can cognitively process as individuals (the dynamics are entertainingly described in the famous Monkeysphere article). That’s the right number to drive long-tail logic. By Kelly’s logic though, I have to get to, say, 100,000 casual occasional customers before I find my 1000 raving fans (1% conversion is realistic).

Face it: there’s no way in hell most of us will get there. If I accidentally did, through this blog, I’d probably erect walls to keep the scary crowds out somehow. That picture makes sense for almost nobody. I write long, dense epic posts and don’t bother to be accessible. I look to attract readers who can keep up with me. Unapologetic intellectuals in fact, whose own eclectic interests overlap sufficiently with mine to create the right mix of resonance, dissonance and dissent. In terms of Geoffrey Moore’s classic pair of business models: complex systems (a few high-touch, high-personalization customers) and volume operations (mass-consumption stuff), this blog is a complex-systems play. I can (and have) written posts entirely with one reader-muse in mind. I have more chance of making a living off 100% of a base of 150 powerful micropatrons than from 1% of a base of 100,000. The question is: which is actually the right type of model for the individual creative (in a crucible of 12 similar-minded others; not selling to each other, but collectively representing a high-value-concentration crucible)?

I am going to make a prediction: personalization and customization will rule. Without that common prefix of the day, “mass-.” Mass customization/personalization is a good model for Enterprise 2.0, but individual creatives have a far better chance of creating an economically sustainable lifestyle by paying close individual attention to 150 people than by selling the same thing to 100,000 and hoping 1% of the sheep convert to your religion. This isn’t to say that volume games can’t succeed. But it isn’t the way most people will succeed, because the numbers will not add up. Can you really imagine a significant proportion of the world’s information worker/creative class being able to draw 100,000 unique visitors per month to their blogs, most of whom will be other creatives trying to build their own 100,000/1000?

The “100,000 base” argument can be safely ignored for most of us. And that’s what I’ve done to most of the 62,000 unique visitors Google Analytics tells me have visited this blog since I opened up shop in July 2007. An overwhelming majority of them bounced away before I could even say “Hi!” Some read one article and never came back, leaving only an IP address behind. In an age where superhits and celebrities are on their way out, that’s what any crowd of ~100,000 will do. Your actual goal as creative today is to find and keep your 150, to whom you pay individual attention. Pass-through crowds don’t deserve much attention. In fact, the monetary value of your transaction with them is exactly $0.00. Anderson hammered home the point that to the masses, the right price for your work is $0.00, but he didn’t address the flip side. They are also worth only $0.00 to you on average. Which means you should put no marginal effort into pleasing them. If one of them finds something you did for your 150 useful, let them have it. You get paid in word-of-mouth, they get free stuff. Small serendipitous barter transaction. Aggregate over 100,000 and net hard-dollar value is still 100,000x$0=$0. The barter is non-zero sum, but doesn’t pay your rent.