What Everyone Got Wrong About ‘the Long Tail’
A decade and a half after the publication of Chris Anderson’s book, most creators have lost out to the aggregators
Fifteen years ago, as Silicon Valley was recovering from the dot-com bust, David Hornik, a long-time VC at August Capital, started seeing a recurring theme in pitches from startup founders: overt references to a new term called “the long tail.” A typical pitch deck included a slide showing a stylized sales graph taken straight from a 2004 Wired magazine article by that name, written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief at the time, Chris Anderson.
“That slide was a constant,” Hornik recalls. “I saw it every week for years.” By the time Anderson converted his article into his bestselling 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, the ideas represented by the term were so well-known in internet startup circles and the slide so commonplace that one founder labeled a slide “The Obligatory Long Tail Slide,” captioning the accompanying graph with the phrase “Enough said.”
“The Long Tail” was Anderson’s catchy name for a set of observations about the economics of internet markets — observations that are as resonant as ever in today’s “passion economy,” in which anyone can try their hand at turning their…
