- Long Tail aggregators (that include both the head and tail of content and products)
- Niche suppliers/producers (who get aggregated by someone else)
- Filters (which help people find what they want)
Most of the examples I've been using to date, such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, fall into the first of these categories, aggregation. But as the smart kids in the front row always point out, there's a seeming paradox at work in that category.
The Long Tail is all about the shift from hits to niches. But aren't all those aggregators "hits"? They're not only the largest players in their category, but they seem to be getting even larger, gaining market share at the expense of their competitors. Is there something about aggregators that tends to favor a few big winners, even as the other two categories fragment into a million niches of varying size?
That's certainly the way it looks now, but I suspect it won't last, or at least won't last as it is. I'll give an example by starting with the biggest of them all, Google.
In a sense, Google is a classic Long Tail aggregator, one that uses great filtering (its PageRank algorithms) to improve the s/n ratio of the tail. And not just one tail. They aggregate the tail of information, the tail of advertisers and the tail of publishers (see this post for more). But is plain old Google enough for all of this? Or is there something more appropriate for many needs than one-size-fits-all search?
The question can be generalized to this: how finely can you slice aggregation? The answer, in the case of search, turns out to be quite finely indeed. The rise of the "vertical search" market is simply a case of slicing aggregation into niches, optimized for different needs. (Actual examples here; imaginary ones here)
In fact, Google itself is already doing this, with Google Local, Google Scholar, Google Maps, Froogle, Google News, Google Print, and so on. Each has a specialized presentation and pulls from a subset of the information universe that gives more appropriate and useful results in that domain. Right now that's Google fine-slicing its own aggregation--the emergence of a long tail of search, but within a short head of search companies--but there are plenty of other firms that are rushing into this market to do the same.
Now let's apply the same approach to media and entertainment aggregation. I've already argued that any Long Tail aggregator has to include both the head and tail of content, to allow the recommendations and filters to carry users from the known to the unknown. But does that only work in broad categories, such as music and film, or could it work just as well, if not better, at the sub-genre level, aggregating the head and tail of just jazz, for instance, or documentaries?
The advantages would be that, instead of a one-size-fits-all presentational model, such as is currently the case in iTunes, you could have a model customized for a genre. I don't know much about jazz, but I'll bet that it might be useful for a jazz music service to have links for each one of the musicians on an album (because they often shift from group to group), much as IMDB tracks the careers of each movie actor and director independently. But that wouldn't be appropriate for pop music, because the individual musicians aren't as important.
Likewise for documentaries. Wouldn't it be useful to have documentaries accompanied by related information and news articles, so the films could be a launching-off point for further exploration of that subject? Or a site just for TV-show DVDs, complete with all the entertainment news and gossip around their stars?
No doubt there are already companies working on all of
many more. What's important, however, is that these fine-slice
aggregators allow themselves, in turn, to be aggregated by the larger,
more general aggregators. Those niche music services should, for
starters, be fully searchable by Google and anyone else. Could they
also do deals with iTunes to be niche specialists, the way individual
merchants are integrated into Amazon's Marketplace and eBay's Stores? I'll bet they could. It's the Long Tail of aggregation, coming soon.