Long Tail or epic fail?

Debunking Chris Anderson's influential tome on the economics of the web is all well and good - but is all the schadenfreude missing the point?

Will Page and Andrew BudMeet Will Page and Andrew Bud. Their mission? Debunking the glossy Web 2.0 theory that underpinned Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail. Well, certainly that's the way they've painted themselves in a nice write-up in the Times before Christmas, in which they say all the jabber about the value in niche markets isn't true.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Debunking the pompous myths of internet blowhards is, after all, one of the most enjoyable activities known to man. But are Page & Bud right?

Some background, first. In essence, the Times story is a rehash of presented in November, which was the subject an Andrew Orlowski hit-job published in the Register at the time.

All of it is based on a piece of work by Page and Bud to look at whether the Long Tail theory is accurate or not - essentially to see whether the numbers stack up.

The basic argument is this: Anderson says digital sales follow a power law curve, but Page says it's logarithmic. The difference, if you've not been looking, is that Anderson's ideas are predicated on the concept that a Long Tail curve is like a mullet: business up front and a party in the back. Page, meanwhile, says the head is big but there's not much else going on.

I've read through Page & Bud's arguments a few times over the past seven weeks, and all I can think is... that they're sort of missing the point.

(A quick disclaimer: we've got a little bit of skin in this game, since Orlowski decided to rope in something written by Jack a couple of years back as evidence of how people were suckered in by Anderson. No surprise that in quoting Jack's point that the Long Tail "is a powerful idea that provides us with a new(ish) way of looking at the world", Orlowski failed to note the next sentence - which said that "The Long Tail isn't that significant" and that "it involves a mental rather than a physical shift".)

Anyway, back to Page & Bud. They say Anderson's numbers don't add up. Anderson says they haven't made their own data available. Others have weighed in too, arguing that there's a confusion between what is the head and what is the tail, and whether or not this is an apples-apples comparison.

I'm not going to argue whether the Long Tail is big enough to be real, whether it's coming down the track or whether it's just economic bunkum.

But it seems to me that the actual point of the Long Tail (which seemed a one-note idea turned into a profitable speaking gig) was a fairly basic and straightforward one about the long-term shift from physical retail to digital: as the cost of storing and distributing digital files moves towards zero, the chance to profit from your back catalogue items becomes a distinct possibility.

To my mind it's not so much the maths that matter, since it's predicated on the unalterable fact that costs are falling, but the interpretation of what that means. And that's where the disjointed nature of this comes in, because it's not the numbers that are fictional, but the idea that this lesson applies to everybody.

That idea - of achieving success by plumbing the Long Tail alone? That's one of the great myths of Web 2.0. Services aimed at niche markets can succeed, but the real thinking about the Long Tail should be aimed at the retailers and distributors - like Amazon or Apple - who can mine both the head and the tail. They're the ones in control here.

Quite how any of this tit-for-tat between Anderson and Page proves or disproves that concept - which seems fairly clear and uncontroversial to me - remains to be seen.

In the end, as it is, I suspect that all of this is just a lot of self-promotion on both counts. Contrarian viewpoints thrive online, since people usually ignore the fact that two apparently conflicting ideas can exist perfectly happily together.

But, hey, if Anderson's made a reputation for himself peddling this stuff, then I'm not shocked to see somebody try and build themselves up by debunking it. I'm only surprised that it's taken so long for somebody to come up with something that appears to be a more credible challenge than the screeds put out by the likes of Andrew Orlowski and Andrew Keen.