Visualizing the rise of the Long Tail or The World is Flat

Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.

The key word there is "aggregate". Popularity is simply a place where many roads--each one a single consumer's path through culture--intersect. Each road is different, but for a brief moment many crossed that point. Hits are products that reflect the coincidence of our collective tastes, and the reality is that most of the things that we agree on are relatively banal (that's why they call it the lowest common denominator).

Individually we may have excellent taste, but collectively we're as low-brow as they come. This is simply an artifact of the statistics of the Long Tail--when demand is spread over a huge number of products, most things won't be popular. And the things that are popular won't necessarily define their consumers.

T'was ever thus: Yogi Berra's quote in the title reflects the reality of minority taste. We're as likely to avoid doing what everyone else is doing as were are to join them. For the discriminating, popularity is often a curse, even if it was their early embrace that kick-started that popularity in the first place.

Once the most popular fare defined our culture. Now a million niches define our culture and the few blockbusters are the exceptions that define none of us, even through many of us brush by them.

David Foster Wallace, writing about television, said it best:

"TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

PR titan Richard Edleman has a great post of media trends and their implications for PR. Two stats in particular caught my eye: "
1) Every dollar coming out of print advertising revenue for newspapers is replaced by only 33 cents online.
2) The largest 50 Web companies are attracting 96% of the ad spending on line, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, with the majority going to AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo."
That second stat sounds like a very short head indeed, until you realize that half of the ad revenues for Google and its ilk are actually redistributed to thousands of smaller sites, via such affliate models as AdSense. It's actually a quite good long tail example.