Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
May 6, 2019 01:57 pm PDT

The attention economy "bifurcating" is just the long tail in dystopia

In this interesting post from 2015getting a viral second windAlex Danco offers a model to understand how the "middle ground" of interest in things is fading. That's the normal distribution, the traditional bell curve that suggests the best place to make your business is at a middle optimum of scale and interest, like so:

Instead, these days, you're either interested or not. To make a go of something, you have to nail either scale or interest (i.e. cheap vs quality):

It strikes me that what Danco's defined here is a flip (on the horizontal axis) of the classic early-2000s theory about how the web would allow creators to make money like never before, the long tail.

The idea was that the internet dissolved gatekeepers, democratized the marketplace, and allowed consumer internet to roam over (and buy) a "long tail" of options that was revealed to them by new technology.

And it did, for some. Mostly, though, the long tail ended up as aggregated social media content. The bonds of content, creator and consumer, far from being remade by the internet, were also dissolved by them. Instead of a long tail, we have a green goo of nanocontent which wants to become as vast as possible, with a couple of big corporations making all the money.

I don't have a clever point to make, I just think it's interesting that social media not only submerged the long tail but made us forget it ever existedand now it's going to be rediscovered from other viewpoints over and over again, each time in increasingly imprecise and alarmed terms. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/KLHPUKMitys/the-attention-economy-bifurc.html

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article