The Long Tail cover
  1. Introduction
  2. iTunes Killed The Radio Star
  3. The 98 Percent Rule
  4. How Technology Is Turning Mass Markets Into Millions Of Niches
  5. The End Of The Hit Parade
  6. Long Tails Everywhere
  7. Make It, Get It Out There, And Help Me Find It
  8. The Wikipedia Phenomenon
  9. Lonely Island
  10. The Ants Have Megaphones. What Are They Saying?
  11. The Wal-Mart Effect
  12. We Are Entering An Era Of Unprecedented Choice. And That's A Good Thing
  13. What's It Like To Live In A Long Tail World?
  14. Video After Television
  15. eBay - How Far Can The Niche Revolution Reach?
  16. Coda: Tomorrow's Tail
  17. Exclusive: The Latest On The Long Tail

This site contains edited extracts from Chris Anderson's acclaimed business book The Long Tail, published in the U.K. by Random House.

The ideas from this book have spread quickly beyond just the web - and are now part of the very way we look at business and culture in the 21st century.

We urge you to read and share these ideas under the Creative Commons terms below.

(You could also just buy the book )

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Read Chris Anderson's Long Tail Blog

An Apt Studio site.

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Video After Television

“TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

—David Foster Wallace

Nobody thought the future of television would look like this. On October 15, 2005, an eight-month-old startup called YouTube unveiled the ultimate Long Tail marketplace of the moving image.

Apple’s iTunes’ polished video store may have had far more network TV content, but YouTube let anyone upload their videos for free and let anyone instantaenously view them by simply clicking on a big play button. .

The result was predictably messy, a near-random collection of everything from banned commercials to baby videos.

But it was also a glimpse into a world of infinite variety, where commercial and amateur video content compete head to head...and the amateurs often win.

On any given day the first YouTube page, with its most popular videos of the moment, said it all. In the rows of thumbnails you could find clips of commercial content (from The Colbert Report to Britney Spears missteps) intermixed with short clips of dumb dogs, funny commercials, and an octopus eating a shark (which was amazing, by the way).

And on the next page and the next and beyond, there was more of the samge: snowboarding wipeouts, funny songs, and people playing video games very, very well.

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‘Read this brilliant and timely book if you want to get a look at the future of business’
Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google

‘The natural successor to the “tipping point” in the field of big business ideas’
Guardian

"The ideas in this book are going to be talked about for the next ten years... get a copy now. It's worth it." Seth Godin

The Long Tail is now available in paperback. You can buy direct from Random House UK, Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones, or find it in any good bookstore.

Read more about The Long Tail

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