Lonely Island

One size of incentive doesn’t fit all. People create things for all sorts of reasons, ranging from expression to reputation.

What makes this important is that there is increasingly frictionless mobility in the Long Tail. In a seamless digital marketplace, from iTunes to the Web itself, content that starts at the bottom can easily move to the top if it strikes a chord.

Understanding the diverse incentives that can motivate the creators of such content becomes essential in finding and encouraging it.

Speaking at a conference in mid-2005, Barry Diller, the media mogul chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, acknowledged that peer production is interesting, but he scoffed at the idea that it is a force capable of rivaling Hollywood.

“People with talent won’t be displaced by 18million people producing stuff they think will have appeal,” he confidently predicted.

What are the odds that he’s right? Well, if you define “people with talent” only as those who have a proven ability to make mass-market blockbusters, Diller may have a point. But there’s more to creativity than Hollywood hits, and people who can strike a chord can come from anywhere, via any path.

Take Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, and Andy Samberg. Until recently, they fit nicely into the category of people Diller’s talent-identification machine had efficiently filtered out.

After college, the three high school buddies relocated to Hollywood together.

They moved into a big house with low rent on Olympic Boulevard and dubbed it the Lonely Island.

Then they tried to figure out how to break into the entertainment industry as a comedy troupe.