Long Tail serves creating Alternatives

Paul Graham wrote in his philosophical essay The Refragmentation: “…For consumers the 20th century world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them… One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC… Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone… And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time… every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors…

…We were literally in sync. I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. I stopped watching it. But it wasn’t just TV. It seemed like everything around me was crap… And in retrospect, it was crap. But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then.

Since Internet is here, it change the world dramatically. We are connected and literally in sync, but in a different way. Internet provides us with a lot of opportunities and CHOICES. So we choose what to read, what to watch, whom to follow. We are social beings. That’s why social media works beautifully for us. We need ‘celebrities’, thought leaders or business leaders to follow. We trust those who achieved something already, and we often follow them because we trust the crowd choice — in the area we are interested in. In the niche we want to be. Creating our own.

Social media disrupted the concept of celebrity, just like many other fields. Globally-recognized celebrities are being disposed of by niche online influencers. A few years ago, Wired calculated the approximate percentage of famous people living in the world: it was less than 1 percent, but that’s still over 600,000 individuals! I bet this figure grows exponentially.

It means we are already here — welcome to the long tail. You can find ANY niche, any interest, and you can combine your own unique combination of influencers to follow. Everyone can build his own unique combination of choices creating his own. Demand shifts towards niches with high availability of choices. We’re all the same but Special Snowflakes. Appreciating our roots and thanking our leaders who brought us here, we create our own demand, our own circles, businesses, offering, niches, and Universes. Because we are Creators. And thanks to Internet we have the Tool. Not only this one, but it makes our creature much easier.

And Yes, it is a trend. Long Tail is growing! It is providing a lot of business-opportunities, where the Long Tail Meets the Blue Ocean: