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Google CEO Eric Schmidt says:
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. > >
and this prompts Long Tail author Chris Anderson to make several admissions:
But there were clearly exceptions to [Long Tail behaviour]. One of the main ones was the irony that there was a very short Head of Long Tail aggregators: Amazon, iTunes, Google and their kin dominate their markets to a blockbuster-like degree.
I blamed this on a still-young market and assumed that even aggregators would fall victim to the flight from one-size-fits-all someday. But new research from McKinsey (free registration req’d) 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, too. > >
As I’ve said many times, both in the book and elsewhere, most of the rewards in the Tail are non-monetary: a larger audience for producers, and more choice for consumers. > >
I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail. > >
There’s more, and he holds on to some of his assertions, but basically, it’s all over for the long tail.