Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail has plenty of advocates and detractors, most notably Anita Elberse’s 2008 critique of the concept in the Harvard Business Review article Should You Invest In The Long Tail. My take is that understanding the concept of the long tail is important – particularly if your business depends in some way on Google – both paid and organic – but like many bestselling business books, The Long Tail sacrifices accuracy in exchange for simplicity. But any controversy around his previous effort is, in my mind, far surpassed by his recently released book, Free.
Why is Free not free?
Despite the oddity of the editor of a money losing magazine continuing to offer overly simplistic theories about business, what is even more interesting is that Anderson’s latest book Free is not, in fact, free. Why is a book about how content wants to be free, for sale at Amazon for $21.59? Malcolm Gladwell did a nice job of tearing Anderson’s book to shreds and it’s hard to add much to that here but Gladwell failed to ask Anderson the simplest question of all: if you believe your own theory, why are you selling your book for money?
Why is Yahoo, an Internet media company, advertising on NYC bus stops?
It’s truly odd that Yahoo, a company that makes its money selling trackable and measurable impressions on the web has chosen to forsake the uniquely measurable nature of the very advertising it sells its own customers for the side of a NYC bus stop. Yahoo! would no doubt argue that it’s commonplace for media companies to advertise in other media (it is – I’d guess that TV shows are one of the biggest buyers of NYC bus advertising) but it’s just too strange when one of the best known brands on the Internet chooses to spend its own dollars not on innovation and not on online advertising but on billboards and bus stands. Money would have to become extraordinarily cheap before I’d advertise an online product offline.
