Before most of us have even had a chance to pick up a copy of The Long Tail, there's already a lot of reality impacting** here. Key claims are being debunked: Consider this week's Portals column in the Wall Street Journal, which earns Lee Gomes an impressive show-me-the-evidence rating of 5 soup cans.
Dang, it's the 78% rule. A key point of the book is that retailers will be selling less of more: More inventory items will generate sales, and top-selling hits will be less dominant. Gomes quotes Chris Anderson, the Long Tail author: "Everywhere I looked the story was the same. ...The 98 Percent Rule turned out to be nearly universal." Skeptical, Gomes rooted around for empirical evidence to validate this claim. And oops, he found that it's based on isolated anecdotes and projections. Gomes explains in his column that "I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn't have any examples of this actually occurring. At Netflix and Amazon, two of his biggest case studies, misses won't outsell hits for at least another decade, he said. None of these qualifications are in the book."
Anderson's reaction was quoted in Wednesday's Good Morning Silicon Valley. But rather than produce hard evidence supporting the supposed 98% Rule, Anderson says Gomes "started off with the wrong end of the stick (looking at the market in percentage terms, which doesn't work because the definition of 'head' keeps changing)...." Huh?
**A line from one of my favorite movies, Tune in Tomorrow, available on Netflix (which hopefully is benefiting from a long-tail effect).
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