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.

An Apt Studio site.

Read Chris Anderson's Long Tail Blog

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Video Marketplaces

Meanwhile Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and a host of others have started their own video marketplaces. The biggest of these sites now rival mainstream TV. Yahoo!’s music video viewership would put it between MTV and VH1 in audience share.

More people watch the most popular Jon Stewart segments online than see them live. Popular online video shows, such as Tiki Bar TV, are routinely watched by several hundred thousand people a day, which puts their viewership on a par with good-sized cable TV shows.

MSNBC’s The Abrams Report, with a multimillion-dollar budget and a crew of dozens, was at the time of this writing watched by an average of 215,000 homes per day.

Rocketboom, a Jon Stewart–like comedy news program created online by exactly two people for the cost of some videotapes, two lights, and a cardboard map, was watched by 200,000 homes per day over the same period.

Now it’s selling advertising and got $40,000 for the five thirty-second spots in its first week. Not quite as high as broadcast TV revenues, perhaps, but the networks would kill for those margins.

This day has been predicted for a decade, but it took the mainstreaming of broadband for it to finally arrive.

A generation that grew up online and developed its media consumption habits in the bandwidth paradise of American university dorm rooms is now totally comfortable watching video on a computer screen.

Increasingly, though, they don’t have to.

The home networking boom is connecting broadband to the living room, and network TiVos, other digital video recorders, and broadband-connect video-game consoles such as the
Xbox 360 are bringing online content to ordinary TVs.

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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.

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