Tuesday, July 12, 2005
The Long Tail: Objections
The Long Tail: Objections: "he calls the Long Tail 'a myth', mostly because I've underestimated the costs of making archive material available. Fighting economics with economics is my favorite battle, so let's dive in with an extensive quotation from Palmer's piece:
There is a very real point where marginal cost exceeds marginal gain and it happens very close to the borderline of the top 20 percent of the selections available on the Long Tail. So, in essence, the Big Hump [his phrase, unfortunately based on a statistical misunderstanding, for Pareto's 80-20 rule] is still the appropriate model for investors and content owners to follow.
Take a movie that already exists. Retain counsel (internal or external) to get all of the appropriate clearances for reduction of the work to the final form factor - ones and zeros. Rent a film chain and color correction suite for the day. Make a 4K file of the entire movie. Down-convert it to every usable format for current distribution and then create files in every resolution required from 56k up.
Now the fun starts. Create meta-tags and descriptions that are meaningful to search engines so people can find the work. Add a DRM (digital rights management) wrapper, so you can get paid. Come on, take a guess... how much have we spent on this single title? Call it $15,000 sitting on a server ready to go. Now remember, we don't know who wants to watch this movie, we are just sure that in time, every movie will be watched according to the Zipfian distribution. Add the cost of money to this equation and multiply by every title in your library. Still sound like a good idea?"
There is a very real point where marginal cost exceeds marginal gain and it happens very close to the borderline of the top 20 percent of the selections available on the Long Tail. So, in essence, the Big Hump [his phrase, unfortunately based on a statistical misunderstanding, for Pareto's 80-20 rule] is still the appropriate model for investors and content owners to follow.
Take a movie that already exists. Retain counsel (internal or external) to get all of the appropriate clearances for reduction of the work to the final form factor - ones and zeros. Rent a film chain and color correction suite for the day. Make a 4K file of the entire movie. Down-convert it to every usable format for current distribution and then create files in every resolution required from 56k up.
Now the fun starts. Create meta-tags and descriptions that are meaningful to search engines so people can find the work. Add a DRM (digital rights management) wrapper, so you can get paid. Come on, take a guess... how much have we spent on this single title? Call it $15,000 sitting on a server ready to go. Now remember, we don't know who wants to watch this movie, we are just sure that in time, every movie will be watched according to the Zipfian distribution. Add the cost of money to this equation and multiply by every title in your library. Still sound like a good idea?"
