The Long Tail

Here is a Bruce Sterling interview (in English and Italian) about The Long Tail.

In the future a million writers with one reader each will be more important than a publication with 10 writers and a million readers.

I think that is obvious. Today the value of one share of stock in the New York Times costs less than the Sunday Times. As Bruce points out, magazines and newspapers are thin anemic things. They have little content and less advertising. No one uses the local classified pages. No one reads the local papers or subscribes to the national magazines. It is cheaper and easier to go on the web and read a dozen interesting blogs than to read a generic publication that has nothing of interest in it.

One Comment

  1. Phoebe wrote:

    Interesting. There’s been so much talk recently of the long tail being financially irrelevant – but I agree with you that it’s more relevant than ever. http://blog.jinni.com/2009/01/can-we-discover-value-in-the-long-tail/

    Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 4:53 am | Permalink