Tag Archives: long tail

So long to the long tail of movies

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Netflix, once the purveyor of many movie options, now has a much more restricted catalog:

Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva on Pexels.com

In the early years of the new millennium, internet theorists and tech startups were fixated on the long tail, the idea, popularized by a 2004 Wired article and subsequent book, that on-demand manufacturing and digital distribution would disrupt the winner-take-all logic of monopoly capitalism and allow businesses to profit by making a nigh-infinite variety of products available to any audience, no matter how small. You could sell one book to a million people, but you could also sell them a million different books, especially once you were freed from the storage constraints of a brick-and-mortar store. The problem is that this theory, that “the future of business is selling less of more,” turned out to be, at least in some cases, almost exactly wrong. Faced with the internet’s overwhelming range of choices, people retreat to the familiar, or flock to the latest TikTok trend. In a 2018 study, researchers found that increasing the number of available movies by a mere 1,000 titles decreased the market share occupied by the bottom 1 percent of DVDs—the ones the long-tail effect should benefit most—by more than 20 percent. Faced with even more options, people just gave up entirely. “When instead of 20,000 DVDs you can choose from 50,000 or 100,000 or 1 million,” the study’s co-author, Wharton professor Serguei Netessine, explained, “what happens is demand for all movies goes down.”…

Netflix won’t say how many movies are on the service at any given time, but estimates put it at fewer than 4,000, less than a hundredth of the vast universe it once provided. Where Netflix’s disc-by-mail service promised you could watch anything you wanted, its streaming incarnation merely promises that you’ll always be able to watch something. In the DVD era, Netflix’s queue would not only show you what was available but what wasn’t—if a disc ended up lost or damaged, the title would be grayed out and it would sink to the bottom of the page. But if a title on your list leaves the site, as dozens do every month, it just disappears: off of Netflix, out of mind. I rarely look at my list at all these days, but when I do, I’m vaguely annoyed that it’s full of things I’ve already watched, as if one time through Army of the Dead wasn’t enough. It’s no longer an agenda, something to be meticulously arranged and checked off one item at a time. (The cinephiles have Letterboxd for that now.) It’s just a pile of stuff.

When Hollywood’s legacy conglomerates launched their own streaming services in 2020, they followed Netflix’s initial model: one low price for a mountain of content. For less than $10 a month, you could access every movie Disney ever made, plus all the Marvels and NatGeo specials you could stuff your eyeballs with. Twice that, and HBO Max would serve up a vast trove of Hollywood history, from Batman to Casablanca, not to mention Game of Thrones and Friends. But they followed Netflix’s arc at an accelerated clip. Two and a half years after HBO Max launched, it started pulling down titles by the fistful, and six months later, Disney+ and Hulu followed suit. “This whole idea of warehousing content on Max, on a streaming platform, in retrospect is incomprehensible,” the CFO of HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, recently told investors. “A small percentage of titles really drives the vast majority of viewership and engagement.” Any title outside that small percentage is at risk of being removed, and while a movie or a TV show that went off the air might once have still been available on disc at your local video store, now, not even the people who create the content own their own copies.

The unchecked sluice of streaming can make it seem like you’ll never run out of things to watch, but that doesn’t mean you can watch anything you want to. When the director William Friedkin died last month, many people were unpleasantly surprised to find his cult favorite To Live and Die in L.A. unavailable to stream at any price, even as a digital rental or purchase. The movie is available on Blu-ray, but while Netflix once had a copy in its library of discs, they didn’t in August. (My local library, at least, does.) In the streaming era, we’ve come to accept such artistic lacunae as a way of life, and if To Live and Die in L.A. isn’t available, you can still watch The Exorcist and The French Connection—not to mention Sorcerer and Cruising and Killer Joe. How much William Friedkin does one person need, anyway?

This sounds like the ongoing issue facing the culture industries: how do they know what will be a hit and which products generate the most interest and money? In the world of movies, TV shows, books, music, and similar media, it is hard to know what viewers, readers, and consumers might find worth their time. Thus, these industries produce hundreds and thousands of options each year. A small group will generate a lot of money and help make the rest of the production possible.

Netflix offered a different possibility: the ability to profit from the edges of the catalog. By being the place where movie viewers could find particular options, they could offer a unique product. Other Internet-based companies, such as Amazon, could offer similar opportunities.

But it sounds like Netflix does not think it profits enough from the long tail. The goal is to make a smaller catalog available and focus on finding the big hits. If this is the plan moving forward, the culture industries continue on a long term path: try to crack the code on what becomes a hit and funnel resources to similar products.

Sociologist discusses the problems of the publishing industry

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A sociologist discusses the major issues facing the publishing industry:

One year ago I interviewed John B. Thompson in the Rail about the state of the publishing industry. Thompson is a Cambridge University sociology professor, and his 2010 book Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the 21st Century was the result of more than five years of talking to editors, publishers, writers, and agents in the U.S. and the U.K. about the rapid changes in the traditional structures of book publishing. Given that these transformations have only continued, I thought it worth checking in with Thompson a year on. An updated second edition of Merchants of Culture will be published in March by Penguin (U.S.) and Polity (U.K.)…

[Thompson:] There are two major developments that are having a profound effect on the publishing industry today and that are creating a situation of deep uncertainty about the future. The first is the continuing economic crisis that has metamorphosed since then into a deeper and more pervasive recession and that has created a tough economic climate for publishers and booksellers. Retailers are often operating on tight margins and reduce their liabilities by ordering less and stocking more cautiously. Booksellers will return more books to publishers in order to reduce the amount of capital tied up in unsold stock. But even these measures may be insufficient as many retailers have been and will be forced out of business. And when retailers close, publishers lose shop windows to display their books and are faced with substantial write-offs for bad debts. This further depresses profit margins that were already under pressure from static or declining sales. It’s an economic snowball effect…

Well, it’s the intensification of a surge in e-book sales, especially in the U.S. While physical book sales are static or declining for most publishers, e-book sales are surging ahead—it is one of the only areas today where trade publishers are seeing serious growth. And the growth is startling: For most U.S. trade publishers e-books accounted for 1 percent or less of overall revenue in 2008. In 2011 the figure is likely to be between 18 and 22 percent (possibly even higher for some houses). And, interestingly, the biggest shift from print to digital has been in commercial fiction, especially genre fiction like romance, science fiction, mystery, and thriller. For fiction as a whole, e-books accounted for around 40 percent of overall sales for some large trade houses by mid-2011. But in some categories of genre fiction and for some authors the percentages were even higher—60 percent for some categories like romance, and even up to 80 percent for some authors. Narrative non-fiction has also seen a significant but smaller shift to digital. Anything more complicated—such as books that use color, like art books or children’s books—has so far lagged far behind. This change is already forcing the key players in publishing to reconsider their positions. Practices that have become settled conventions in the field are suddenly opened up to scrutiny, and players who have interacted amicably for years suddenly find themselves locking horns in new conflicts where the rules are no longer clear (as happened, for example, when Random House and Andrew Wylie clashed over Wylie’s decision to launch Odyssey Editions). To what extent the game of trade publishing will actually be transformed by this development remains, at this stage, unclear. Much will depend on how quickly and effectively the key players are able to adapt to the new information environment that is emerging around them. We are living through a revolution of sorts, and one of the few things you can say for certain about a revolution is that when you’re in the middle of one, you have no idea where and when it will end.

New technology means that a lot of people need to adapt, producers and readers included. Two additional areas I wish Thompson had commented on here:

1. It would be interesting to hear more about publishers and other actors are trying out some new ideas in order to make money off e-publishing. Amazon now has a publishing wing. Are the major publishers really shifting major resources and people to this or are they trying to hold the line? Do the recent commercials on TV and radio for books (examples from James Patterson here and here) represent these publishers continuing to hold to the old model? How much overlap is there between the e-book and traditional publishing world?

2. Thompson talks a bit about the future role of books. I’d be interested in hearing more about whether how the “long tail” phenomenon and growing e-book sales in certain genres will change larger cultural meanings and understandings. Not so much whether books will matter (I think they still will) but how they matter. Will popular e-books really only matter if a movie gets made or the author makes it to a popular daytime talk show? What books will become “classics”? Fifty years from now, which books will form a “canon” for this era?