The Long Tail is Not Just Long

It's FAT, fatter than some of its detractors have been saying. From the NYTimes.

What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood.

Netflix stocks most of the 60,000 movies, television shows and how-to videos that are available on DVD.

Just as important, for the sake of "The Conversation," Netflix lets users rate movies on a one- to five-star scale and make online recommendations to their friends. The company's servers also sift through the one billion ratings in its system to tell you which movies that you might like, based on which ones you have already liked.

The result is a vast movie meritocracy that gives a film a second or third life simply because — get this — it's good. Last year, "The Conversation" (average rating: four stars) was the 13th-most-watched movie from the early 1970's on Netflix.

Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix's inventory, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day? The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?

Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000.

That's right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. "Americans' tastes are really broad," says Reed Hastings, Netflix's chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process.

This is exactly what the net was supposed to do, stretch the market into every niche, aggregate whisps of demand into viable markets and, above all, free us from the content and scheduling straightjackets that big media and entertainment companies use to wring money out of us, instead of seducing it out of us.

The system is working as intended and the universe is unfolding exactly as it should.

Comments

[Daniel K]

I think the endgame of digital projection in theatres is long-tail releasing. If you don't have to pay for thousands of prints or lock up a single theatre for a week with a limited appeal movie, you naturally get more limeted-appeal movies. Suddenly it's profitable to distribute quirky independents, and take a few chances with storytelling. I for one can't wait.