Tailonomics 101: The Vert Ramp and the Content Ceiling
Mark Cuban has a very compelling piece up today that discusses some of the economics of the Long Tail. It is interesting mostly in that it is a very harsh, and potentially telling, view on just what success might take. There are quite a few interesting points, though I recommend you read the whole thing.
Mark’s first point is to provide more context around the Long Tail’s topography. He identifies new labels for two areas of the graph - The Vert Ramp and the Content Ceiling. Mark’s done a nice job explaining it but I just though the diagram needed some help so I created a new one:
Now, as I’ve shown it here, there are the Capital Needs on the Y-axis and Commercial Interests on the X-axis. Mark makes a good point that when you really are in it for the money - you need to be in it for the money. The last PEW study estimated that more than 10% of “bloggers” wanted to blog for the money. I’d imagine, however, that given the insight that blogging might net them more than pennies, quite a few more individuals would be interested in shaking the money tree. As Mark notes:
First content providers, whether podcasters, vloggers, bloggers, movie makers, writers, poets, whatever the content type make the decision of the creation of the content is about love or money. Is the goal of the finished product commercial, or purely personal ?Mark introduces the notion of a Content Ceiling - reflecting the point where the tail starts to transition upwards. The Ceiling is actually the threshold where enough circumstances become positive that an actual business can ignite. For this reason, Mark refers to the many individuals toiling in the lower recesses of the Long Tail as the Ghetto. In the Long Tail Ghetto, there is an abundance of people pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into a proposition that barely nets them minimum wage.If the goal is commercial, whether to make money directly or indirectly from the content, then the battle to fight through the Content Ceiling begins.The bottom line is that people want to get paid for their work. Creators have a vision. They think there is something special about it, and they want to get rewarded for their effort. Its a simple goal in concept, but its incredibly difficult to achieve.
For all the talk of the internet changing distribution, the reality is that in order to break through the Content Ceiling and to climb the Vert Ramp, 99.9 pct of content creators are going to do need OPM (Other Peoples Money). The internet alone is not going to get the job done. You can put your content everywhere and anywhere the net allows you to be hosted, but for most people the amount of revenues for that content you had before you started the hosting process will be the exact same as what you have after the hosting process.This is an interesting point as well, though I am not sure how much I agree as of yet. On the one hand, I believe that the economics of the Long Tail are fundamentally flawed if not solely than that they still revolve around hits. We are still in the very early stages of learning what influence and attention are valued, but ultimately, I believe that the eyeball model will cede in many different places to one based on influence. To that end, moving from a small scale publisher with a small audience, you will need a lot of money - the kind of money that makes publishing and distribution broad and meaningful quickly. Mark's point seems to be that the crux of that happens in unline (that place not online).
Naturally, my role at SocialRoots taints my views on this world. Whereas I believe there is a ghetto.. I think there’s also a market. When the conversation is made granular - note a different set of tools is required to handle boulders than gems, it may be that distribution and reach are things that can equally be distributed.
If a hit today is 100M (viewers, listeners, readers, downloads, etc), what will it be in 3 years? How many tails are there? As infinite as the tail itself?
technorati tags:mark+cuban, long+tail, socialroots, content+ceiling, vert+ramp, blogging, podcasting, social+media