Chris Anderson has an interesting post, A Billion Dollar Question, about the impact of distribution bottlenecks on satisfying the latent demand in markets with a Long Tail shape. To tie this to Frank’s recent post, one might ponder how snipped tails affect preferences over time?
Quick update: just after posting, I realized that “snipped tails” may not make much sense. Basically, I was alluding to the idea that bottlenecks cut short distribution to the end of the tail – hence the use of “snip.”
Yes, the bottleneck question is big. When I presented on fair use privileges for search engines last week, some of the hardest questions concerned the reach of the privilege–i.e., how much does someone have to do to qualify as a “search engine?” In other words, if we’re going to let these services qualify for some protection so they can search others’ “long tails” of content, do we need to limit it to, say, only services that search a wide range of content (so they’re searching many long tails)?
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