Recognizing the wisdom of Chris Anderson's Long Tail insight even if it seems to have been overinflated, I want it to be true and I like the notion that resellers of content in the digital age can make more money off of content in the Long Tail. But if I'm an online seller of, say, books and I'm selling not the top 100 bestsellers but books 101-100,000, I may do okay, but how much better does the author of book 100,000 do? Probably not that much better.

That is the key insight that has been left out of the Long Tail debate but is presented eloquently by Mark Cuban (that was hard for me to write, as a Suns fan I find his basketball team to be a bunch of whiners and thugs).

"No content creator wants to be on the Long Tail," Cuban writes, and I agree. A number of his commenters disagree, but either (a) they don't really want to make money, so they're irrelevant in a discussion that deals with profit, or (b) they operate in a niche, in which case they may be at the top of their niche curve. Cuban says that naturally any content holder wants to move up the "vert ramp" to a higher point on the curve (more sales) and to do that will likely need Other People's Money (OPM). Cuban runs a cable network and has funded major motion pictures, so he knows a little bit about the kind of money needed to move content up the Long Tail.

This analysis will severely disturb some people out there.

The Long Tail is many things to many people (for Chris Anderson it's a money-maker with sales high up the curve, near the top if the curve is the business how-to market). To commons advocates, the Long Tail fits with the mindset that the arrival of digital technology and the ease of access to information that comes with it is somehow the cause of a cultural shift, toward ownership and production.

Creators will want to create content, and the Long Tail will provide just enough to continue to encourage that, while letting us enrich ourselves with that content at virtually no cost. It's like magic! And of course, as Benkler tells us, we'll all want to produce content to make the world a better place, and this approach to production will supplant existing methods and motivations. With all these bits flying about, making the world a better place, it will be anachronistic to claim ownership to any bits, but who needs to, when society is providing everything we need? It's all very Utopian, and those movements ran aground in the past, but Robert Owen didn't have the Internet.

Bottom line, even in the youngest generation there are those who want to be paid for their creations. And Cuban may be old-fashioned, but he's right that people would rather be paid more than less, and he's right that sometimes you need money to make money and you may need that money from someone else. These are pretty basic economic principles; no one has yet convinced me that they no longer apply in a digital age.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 1:57 PM | Free Culture Movement

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | Post a Comment(2)