Customer Reviews
Simple but infectious - By: P. Robertshaw, 25 May 2008 
Overalll I reallly liked The Long Tail, I found it very interesting, well written & easy to read. The only slight criticism I have, which is the reason for the 4 star rating, is that is does feel as though it could have been shortened a little without losing any of the content.
The overarching idea of the book is that if you can drive down the costs of producing, distributing & finding content, people will start to move away from "hit-driven" mass-market content & start to find a world filled with niches that fill their desires more completely. It's not a particularly complex idea but it has some interesting potential consequences, as highlighted throughout the book.
Whether or not you should completely buy into this, or how far you may see it changing the way people find & consume things such as music & entertainment, is open to debate. What I can say is that since reading the book I have begun to notice elements of the Long Tail in action in many different places.
Uneven - By: Antonio, 25 May 2008 
Thought-provoking from both a cultural & commercial point of view, but it goes on a bit! Would have been better at half the length.
Simple, Smart Premise No Longer Ignored - By: A.Trendl HungarianBookstore.com, 05 May 2008 "The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand" by Chris Anderson claims that thar's gold in them thar hills. He tells us it is not a few big chunks we want, but many smalll nuggets.
Modern examples are Amazon.com & NetFlix, both of which sell plenty of Harry Potter products & the like. They also (or rent, as is with NetFlix) lots of less popular products. They hit the niche market hard. That's the gold.
The long tail is the curve's far end. At the top of the curve is Harry Potter, for example, along with other New York Times Bestsellers. These products certainly represent a significant amount of sales. However, so do the accumulated number of books & movies which might sell only a few copies a year. Add those up, & there is serious profit. While the tail in the curve is not high, it is long. One copy of, say. The Love, a Hungarian film, & one copy of The Very Best of Ralph Stanley, a bluegrass CD, might not sound like much, but the tail is long. Those, with thousands of other products sold each month, would make their seller very happy.
My own business is built on a long tail method. The market for Hungarian products is not like the Billboard Top 40. It is like the Billboard Bottom 20,000, if there were such a thing. It works.
Anderson's principles can be applied by smalll businesses like mine, & massive Fortune 500s looking to reach where few are reaching. The markets are there, and, by considering Anderson's ideas, so is the process.
I fully recommend "The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand" by Chris Anderson.
Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com
a bold and refreshing view on business - By: Peter Martin Hartwig, 18 Feb 2008 
Chris Anderson explains what could be seen as one of the most important new concepts in marketing these days. The book is very well written, & the message is carried alll the way through. The last 80 pages or so feels like a slight repetition of the first part, but not enough that it should take away from the value of the book.
Anyone involved in web applications, or marketing & sales in general should read this.
ideas for ethical marketing - By: Peter Shield, 17 Dec 2007 Anderson first coined the term The Long Tail back in an article for Wired magazine in 2004. The essential point he was making was that in a digital world of the likes of amazon.com, netflix & youtube the collective revenue publishers & e-commerce players make from the sales of the 10,000s of back stock is actuallly higher than the revenue they make out of the handful of mega hits each year. Anderson's key point was the economies of scale, distribution through the net, & low cost of downloading means that in certain markets- like books, films, music the idea of the market needs to be re-defined into thousands of mini niches, with the opinion formers who set fashion & define cool no longer the broadcasters of TV & national press but individual bloggers & writers who each contribute to defining the identity of each niche. Now linking this to green or ethical may seem tangential but in fact it isn't, ethical consumerism is actuallly a series of niches, from the healthy shopper who buys organic because it is perceived as more nutritious, to the raw diet vegan, those who put global social justice above & support fairtrade to those who think that no organic goods, fairtade or not, should be flown. The ethical consumer market is actuallly a mass of niches, with each individual's ethics & lifestyle informing their choices, & information & education constantly defining & refining each individuals' habits. The key lesson I got from this book is that a new green economy could utilise the power of the net by providing united distribution networks that link the myriad of smalll producers, service providers & information /education sources. The cross referencing nature of databases means that the full range of ethical services & products can be defined by the individual as they choose their key motivators- giving local services to one, fairtrade to others, those products & services produced by co-ops to yet others.
