General

The long tail, curtailed?

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail thesis, it appears, is bunk. The basic problem is that the “big head of novelty” is growing so fast that there’s no serious market in long-dormant long tail items:

If we do a search on those sites and narrow it down to the last 24 hours; we get a enormous amount of new URLs:

– 45,800 for the New York Times (out of 12m total URLs)

  • 37,400 for The Guardian (out of 20m)
  • 21,900 for Le Monde (out of 1.05m)
  • 69,300 for Aftonbladet.se — #1 site in Sweden — (out of 1.2m)

Of course, this includes all types of URLs, from new articles to the smallest items added (comments, blogs entries, graphs, automatically generated stuff…) But it has been estimated that just one week of the New York Times is equivalent to the amount of information an 18th Century human being would absorb during his/her entire life.

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