Chris Anderson (writer)

Chris Anderson (born July 9, 1961) is editor-in-chief of Wired, which has won a National Magazine Award for general excellence three times during his tenure.

Chris Anderson in 2005

Sourced

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Page numbers refer to the 2006 Hyperion edition, ISBN 1401302378.

• Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to becoming mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a thousand little indulgences that sets us apart from others.
  • Introduction to the 2006 edition, p. 11

• For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.
  • Ch. 1, p. 24

• The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another.
  • Ch. 2, p. 40

• We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests.
  • Ch. 2, p. 40

• In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distributions, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
  • Ch. 4, p. 52

• A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.
  • Ch. 4, p. 53

• Talent is not universal but it is widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge.
  • Ch. 4, p. 54

• Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory.
  • Ch. 5, p. 58

• The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers.
  • Ch. 5, p. 70

• The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits.
  • Ch. 6, p. 96

• For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.
  • Ch. 7, p. 99

• In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king. (Chris Anderson quoting Rob Reid)
  • Ch. 7, p. 109

• Broadly, the Long Tail is about abundance. Abundant shelf space, abundant distribution, abundant choice.
  • Ch. 8, p. 143

• Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.
  • Ch. 9, p. 163

• Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air.
  • Ch. 9, p. 167

• We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing.
  • Ch. 10, p. 168

• Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating.
  • Ch. 10, p. 174

• This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation.
  • Ch. 11, p. 190

• Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions.
  • Ch. 11, p. 191