Quality and the Long Tail

Chris Anderson continues his exploration of the Long Tail by acknowledging in a blog posting that "the Long Tail is indeed full of crap". Of course, he is not referring to the concept, but instead is referring to the variability in quality of the goods or services available, especially as one moves down the the Long Tail.

While Chris is doing a masterful job of developing his powerful concept, I confess that I have some problems with this particular post.  For one, he seems to switch gears in mid-post when he describes quality.  Toward the end of the post, he acknowledges that "high quality" and "low quality" are "of course, entirely subjective. . . . there are no absolute measures of content quality. One person’s ‘good’ could easily be another person’s ‘bad’; indeed it almost always is." Yet, he devotes the early part of his post to broad generalizations suggesting that quality is more objective.  For example,

"note that you have high-quality goods in every part of the curve, from top to bottom. Yes, there are more low-quality goods in the tail and the average level of quality declines as you go down the curve."

He also asserts that signal to noise ratios decrease as one move down the tail.  Really?  Isn’t that subjective?  I may be a real outlier (aren’t we all?) but, at least for me in the realm of music, the signal to noise ratio decreases as I move up the tail. The real point, I think, is that the sheer quantity (rather than the quality) of items increases as we move down the tail and the ready availability of information about these items diminishes – that’s what increases the difficulty of connecting with relevant resources as we move down the tail.

Chris also strikes me as much too cavalier, at least in this post, about the ability of filters to help people find the goods and services they perceive as high quality.  For example, "the ratio of good to bad is simply a signal-to-noise problem, solvable with information tools.  Which is to say it’s not much of a problem at all. You just need better filters . . ." Well, at least from my perspective, this is still a huge problem, which is to suggest that it is also a huge opportunity.  The filters we have today are still primitive.  They have only limited ability to help us find resources we are actually looking for and discover valuable resources that we did not even know about – and to know how to strike an appropriate balance between these two goals.

As shelf space constraints give way to the abundance of the Long Tail, the new scarce good is our attention.  We each only have 24 hours in the day – that is one constant we can count on.  So, those who can help us maximize our return on attention by providing more effective filtering will in turn maximize their own financial returns.  They will also create a next generation of powerful brands that will make existing brands looks weak by comparison, something that I will shortly be writing more about over on my personal web site.