gregword

I like Alex Iskold’s article over on Read/Write Web entitled There’s No Money in the Long Tail of the Blogosphere.  I said the same thing once upon a time, a while back, but apparently it wasn’t on any of my blogs, so I can’t find it.  But, yes, the only money to be made from the “long tail” is if you’re aggregating it (or as Alex puts it, “on” the tail, and not “in” the tail).

That being said, I still think there’s opportunities to make money not in the long tail, per se, but as a niche content provider.  I guess if you’re making enough money to live off of (which certainly wouldn’t apply to 90+% of bloggers), you’re not really long tail, but the nature of the web is such that you can aggregate a global audience on a niche topic due to the distribution being next to nothing in cost.

Perhaps we should focus less on long tail economics, which are really just aggregation/network models, and promote the idea of niche content.  Could be another book/slogan/conference series in the making…