The long tail of movies/TVs is youtube. The long tail of music is soundcloud. These content creators are using platform revenue + Patreon and tiny production costs to survive as basically hobbyist endeavors in many cases.
What worries me is that it is becoming more and more difficult to find the long tail on Youtube (I don't use Soundcloud so can't comment there).
Youtube's search has become useless (to the point where it has become a meme that people are now using non-Youtube search engines to search for content on Youtube), and its recommendation algorithm is designed to promote what is popular (the short-tail).
It's still possible to create a new channel on Youtube that offers something different, of course. It's just harder to get visibility on that content because the same "chase the short-tail, ignore the long-tail" strategy is starting to find its way into how modern search engines behave as well.
I used to disagree with the claim that if you didn't rank in the top 5 search results you didn't rank at all. My disagreement was based on the fact that I earned a living from a website that received most of its traffic from organic search results. These days though, I think that's becoming more and more true based on how search engines present results to the user.
YouTube seems to have some sort of multi-armed bandit approach going on because I’ll frequently be presented with a topical video with few subscribers and few views on my home feed.
Yes the offer of music and video has increased substantially, but "long tail market"? Are there big enterprises making bank off niche consumers? I'm not so sure.
As a consumer I don't care much either though, as long as the content is there.
The author talks about both money and variety voices/exposure for more people.
Here’s what I think they miss:
Netflix went from being part of the long tail to becoming an incumbent. Netflix then tries to find more big hits to maintain big incumbent winnings. And incumbents have been in many cases doubling down. But that’s exactly because the long tail is eating the “medium tail” that incumbents used to profit off of alive.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the long tail to bring in money. Though a competitive long tail will restrict just how high your margins can be.
The long tail threatens Netflix now (if only to an extent: something like Squid Game becoming a hit in the US would blow the mind of someone in 2006 and seem like a perfect example of long tail content being able to not just be economically viable but potentially turn into a huge winner).
But it threatens Spotify much less! They thrive off of it! The music world isn’t a bunch of services with exclusives trying to be winner take all, most content is across services.
Similarly it threatens Amazon, AliExpress, Etsy, etc, much less than Netflix.
The money in a “produce content for a small niche” was never going to be big for an individual producer, the money in that was going to be in being a successful aggregator, but in a competitive market you can only squeeze that so far.
But if the long tail was dead in terms of people being able to get exposure and views and listens then the YouTube and Spotifys of the world and the big labels would be raking in cash like they used to. They’d have a product without much competition and they could charge more for it from all sides, and take more off the top from artists too. Instead they’re in a pickle because it’s hard to compete with free and the free long-tail is getting bigger and bigger and bigger in terms of popular appeal (like things like youtube videos of people playing video games, which simply didn’t used to take ANY viewership away from TV shows).
