The Long Tail (10 page)

The effect of this is being felt throughout the industry, right up to the giant booksellers. In 2005, Barnes & Noble sold 20 percent more unique titles than it had in 2004, something its CEO, Steve Riggio, attributes to three forces: (1) the efficiencies of print-on-demand, which keeps more books in print; (2) the increase in the number of smaller and independent publishers; and (3) self-publishing.

“Over the next few years, the traditional definition of what a ‘published book’ is will have less meaning,” he says. “Individuals will increasingly use the Internet as a first stage to publish their work, whether they are books, short stories, works in progress, or articles on their area of expertise. The best of this work will turn into physical books. I tend to be sanguine about the book industry’s prospects be
cause a whole new and efficient means of first-step publishing is emerging and rapidly becoming more sophisticated.”

One of the big differences between the head and the tail of producers is that the farther down you are in the tail, the more likely you are to have to keep your day job. And that’s okay. The distinction between “professional” producers and “amateurs” is blurring and may, in fact, ultimately become irrelevant. We make not just what we’re paid to make, but also what we
want
to make. And both can have value.

South Korea’s “citizen journalism” phenomenon, created in 2000 by OhmyNews, is another example. At OhmyNews, about sixty-five professional reporters and editors screen, edit, and complement news articles written by more than 60,000 amateurs, from elementary school students to professors. These volunteers submit between 150 and 200 articles a day, which account for more than two-thirds of OhmyNews’s content. For this, they receive a pittance: If the article goes to the front page, which only a small fraction do, the author gets around $20. Why do they do it? “They are writing articles to change the world, not to earn money,” says Oh Yeon Ho, the site’s founder.

From filmmakers to bloggers, producers of all sorts that start in the Tail with few expectations of commercial success can afford to take chances. They’re willing to take more risks, because they have less to lose. There’s no need for permission, a business plan, or even capital. The tools of creativity are now cheap, and talent is more widely distributed than we know. Seen this way, the Long Tail promises to become the crucible of creativity, a place where ideas form and grow before evolving into commercial form.

CASE STUDY: LONELY ISLAND

One size of incentive doesn’t fit all. People create things for all sorts of reasons, ranging from expression to reputation. What makes this important is that there is increasingly frictionless mobility in the Long Tail. In a seamless digital marketplace, from iTunes to the Web itself, content that starts at the bottom can easily move to the top if it
strikes a chord. Understanding the diverse incentives that can motivate the creators of such content becomes essential in finding and encouraging it.

Speaking at a conference in mid-2005, Barry Diller, the media mogul chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, acknowledged that peer production is interesting, but he scoffed at the idea that it is a force capable of rivaling Hollywood. “People with talent won’t be displaced by 18 million people producing stuff they think will have appeal,” he confidently predicted.

What are the odds that he’s right? Well, if you define “people with talent” only as those who have a proven ability to make mass-market blockbusters, Diller may have a point. But there’s more to creativity than Hollywood hits, and people who can strike a chord can come from anywhere, via any path.

Take Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, and Andy Samberg. Until recently, they fit nicely into the category of people Diller’s talent-identification machine had efficiently filtered out.

After college, the three high school buddies relocated to Hollywood together. They moved into a big house with low rent on Olympic Boulevard and dubbed it the Lonely Island. Then they tried to figure out how to break into the entertainment industry as a comedy troupe.

It isn’t easy for an individual comic to make it in TV—even as a writer—but it’s even harder for a preassembled team. Sure enough, the threesome quickly ran up against all the usual barriers in their hunt for work in Hollywood. However, rather than subject themselves to endless rejection, the three took their act—now named after their home—online. Borrowing some video gear, the Lonely Island crew started producing short-form comedy videos and songs. Schaffer’s kid brother Micah—a tech consultant and Internet agitpropster—threw together their Web site, thelonelyisland.com, in 2001.

The Lonely Islanders started with white-boy rap music videos, presented with signature deadpan humor. One of the first videos was about things that are “ka-blamo!” (as in, “You kissed Shannen Doherty”) and things that aren’t (“I majored in pottery”). As is sometimes the case for such amusing ephemera, the video circulated widely on
the Internet. At one point, a Dutch DJ “mashed” it up (mixed it with other video footage), further boosting its popularity.

Soon more videos and fan mashups followed, something the group encouraged by releasing their videos under a Creative Commons license that freely permitted creative reuse. In just a few years, the Lonely Island was “Internet famous,” which is to say they were big with the demographic that has traded its TV time for online time, constantly surfing the contours of online subculture.

Capitalizing on their online celebrity, the Dudes—as they’re known to fans—scored better writing and performing gigs. Still, their main show continued to be online. The first episode of their “Internet prime time” series was called “The ’Bu.” “Young, sexy people that live in Malibu call it The ’Bu,” reads thelonelyisland.com, “because when you say the entire word, it takes time, and then you wouldn’t be young anymore.”

As the group’s cult following grew, word of their shorts got to
Saturday Night Live
star Tina Fey and the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels. In mid-2005, the threesome flew to Manhattan for auditions with the most famous team in comedy. In short order, all of the Dudes were hired.

In December 2005, the Lonely Island crew did another one of their white-boy rap sendups on
SNL
. Riffing on the
Chronicles of Narnia
film, the sketch was, as expected, twisted, wrong, and very, very funny. Now that the crew is on network TV, the skit went out as broadcast on a Saturday night, when it was watched by the usual (dwindling) audience, most of whom no doubt laughed and forgot about it.

But some people had recorded the show to their DVRs, and a few of them recognized a flash of brilliance in the
Narnia
skit. So they uploaded the video to the Internet. After it started to take off in the usual link frenzy, NBC heard the stampede and put the video on the official
SNL
site and even iTunes. Then, once again, the viral video effect kicked in—this time bigger than ever.

Jeff Jarvis, a media commentator, described the impact like this: “I haven’t heard anyone buzz about, recommend, or admit to watching
SNL
in, oh, a generation. But suddenly, I hear lots of buzz about the show. And it’s not because millions happened to start watching when
the show happened to actually be funny again. No, the buzz is born because folks started distributing the
Narnia
bit, which indeed is funny, on the Internet, and people are linking to it. NBC is learning the power of the network that no one owns.” And sure enough, links to the
SNL
site increased more than 200-fold in the two weeks after the video started circulating.

The Lonely Island tale has come full circle. Misfits rejected by the entertainment industry go online and get popular. Entertainment industry wakes up to this phenomenon in the hard-to-reach demographic of influential twenty-somethings and hires the misfits. The kids do the same thing on broadcast TV, but since that influential demographic doesn’t actually watch much TV, it isn’t until the skit
goes back online
(now amplified by the net-kids-make-it-big appeal) that the skit gets really popular. Thus
SNL,
previously scorned by the online generation, suddenly gets cool again by tapping into the authentic underground spirit blossoming online. Once upon a time, the show used to handpick its talent pool from obscure regional theaters and improv troupes. Now they also find it online.

So what’s the lesson in this story? Well, on one hand, the existing entertainment industry filters did recognize the appeal of the Lonely Island and found a way to tap it. In that sense, maybe the system works. Yet if three kids with a video camera doing goofy raps and putting them on their Web site isn’t “18 million people producing stuff they think will have appeal”—to borrow Diller’s scornful phrase—I really don’t know what is.

The truth is that the next generation of talent will probably come from the 18 million people doing their own thing—and these are the people who are most likely to save Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry from grinding formula. Maybe Diller is right. Maybe there are only a small number of people who can write
Friends
. But just think about how many people can produce quirkier fare, like the
Narnia
sketch, content that can resonate with an audience that has grown up online—the place where niches, not networks, rule. Think about how many of those potential talents now have a chance to find a real audience, thanks to the democratized distribution of the Internet.

It may still require the full might of the Hollywood machine to make a multiseason drama with high production qualities. But over that same time hundreds of grassroots videos can collectively capture a similar size audience. That comparison would seem like apples and oranges—lasting commercial brands versus transient amateur amusements—were it not for the fact that the two compete for the time of a generation of Web-savvy viewers. If they’re watching one kind of video, they’re not watching the other.

What Diller neglects to consider is that today there seems to be less demand for blockbusters than there is for focused or targeted content that
isn’t
for everybody. As the audience continues to move away from Top 40 music and blockbusters, the demand is spreading to vast numbers of smaller artists who speak more authentically to their audience. So what if 99 percent of blogs will never attract an audience of more than a few dozen? The fraction of a percent that
do
emerge with broader reach still number in the thousands. And collectively, that 1 percent can draw as much traffic as many mainstream media. The typical “viral video” sensation is seen by several million people, something that can only be said for the most popular TV shows.

As with authors who self-publish their books via Lulu, the products themselves aren’t usually making much if any money, but that’s not the point. The point is simply that the product exists and it’s taking audience share. It isn’t a creation of the traditional commercial industry, but it competes with it. Today, the number of people who produce content is far more than the usual talent finders of the media can process—the wave of grassroots creativity would overwhelm the script-readers and tape-listeners of any studio and label. Because the tools of production have entirely democratized, the population of producers is expanding exponentially, and now there’s little stopping those with the will and skill to create from doing just that.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF PARTICIPATION

We’ve seen parts of this story before. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the combination of the electric guitar, the arrival of cheap
multitrack recorders, and the fine example set by the Sex Pistols gave license to a generation of kids with no musical training, obvious talent, or permission from anyone to start bands and record music. When punk rock exploded onto the scene, it was a shocking epiphany for a generation of kids in the mosh pit. Watching someone your age play three chords badly, while jumping around on stage, one couldn’t but think: “I could do
that
.”

For a while, the assumption was that to be a musician, the right way of learning was to copy the masters. So you should start by playing covers, reading music, and maybe going to music school. This was the notion of paying your dues: Do the circuit, and play the standards, because that’s what people want (no one wants to hear your crappy original compositions). Do it
right
.

But punk rock changed the game. Punk rock said: “Okay, you have your guitar, but you
don’t
have to do it right. You can do it wrong! It doesn’t matter one bit if you’re a skilled musician; it just matters if you have something to say.”

Through punk rock, we saw a premium on fresh voices, new sounds, vigor, and an antiestablishment sentiment that could have only come from outside the system. It was inspirational to see people out there with no more talent than you, having fun, being admired, doing something novel. To put it in economic terms, punk rock lowered the barriers of entry to creation.

The traditional line between producers and consumers has blurred. Consumers are also producers. Some create from scratch; others modify the works of others, literally or figuratively remixing it. In the blog world, we talk about “the former audience”—readers who have shifted from passive consumers to active producers, commenting and blogging right back at the mainstream media. Others contribute to the process nothing more than their Internet-amplified word of mouth, doing what was once the work of radio DJs, music magazine reviewers, and marketers.

The result is starting to look like what Tim O’Reilly, a book publisher and seer of the DIY age, calls the “The New Architecture of Participation.”