At the Rocket Science Group, the creative minds were growing weary of implementing the same feature into their clients’

“And I thought… Well, this is our chance to start a company. My business partner and I went out and got clients. We went knocking on doors, down the hall from our office. And we got paying projects. We got a $13,000 project and a $32,000 project. Before even getting a business licence.”

Nonetheless, for the majority of creators, the Long Tail has underdelivered financially. “The way [Anderson] wrote about it caused people to think that individual content creators will suddenly make more money than they used to,” Edery says, “and I just don’t know that that’s true.”

There is no question that some producers are succeeding in the Long Tail, some wildly — just think of the YouTubers and Instagram influencers who are earning millions focusing on makeup tips, product unboxing, and other specialized topics. And countless other producers now stand at least a chance to profit from their passions.

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impediment to creativity fascinating. I wonder how many great ideas have been hatched and summarily dismissed because they weren’t aligned with the prevailing culture. Artists working in isolation internalize the creative constraints of their community, embodying their own toughest critics. The pile of crumpled paper in the wastepaper basket is a testament to this process. The challenge isn’t so much in processes of creative variation (such as propping your dog up at the piano) as in the means for selection. Incidentally, this same environment-building challenge is what limits the reach of evolutionary approaches to the problem.

Unfortunately for artists, that also means a chance to lose money. The Long Tail fosters intense competition among niche creators: Though digital shelf space is unlimited, consumers’ time and attention remain finite, so creators have to spend more and more resources to try to stand out. This is why we see so much free content and so many ads. As in any arms race, each contender has a shot at a payoff — but the only sure winners in this marketing arms race are the platforms.

Ongoing marketing costs are one of a couple of major ways that Long Tail platforms have shifted significant risks back to the creators. Up-front costs are another. Spotify pays nothing for a song that never gets played, and Airbnb pays nothing for a room that happens to stay vacant; these platforms have no skin in the game. Meanwhile, the musician had to create the song and the Airbnb host had to pay the mortgage.

What does the Long Tail have to do with this risk shift? In the earlier era of limited shelf space, distributors had to put money where their mouths were: retailers, publishers, and other intermediaries, therefore, had to be discerning gatekeepers. They managed to mitigate their downside risk through a portfolio approach, where winners would cover the losses from the also-rans. In today’s era of The Long Tail, where the upside to infinite inventory is high and the downside negligible, the incentive to the platforms is to open the gates and take all comers. That approach pits the creators against one another without providing up-front backing. The result is exactly backward: The party that can least manage the risk (the individual creator) is the one shouldering it.

After getting laid off in 2000, Ben Chestnut resorted to the trade he knew best — designing websites. Over the years, he’d built “about 2 thousand” banner ads for his former employer, Cox newspapers. He knew exactly how to design clickable things online.

The question prompted Ben and his team to review the core logic — and the foreseeable future — of their business. A spreadsheet was opened, listing detailed revenues from all of the agency’s projects. It was one of the lines on that spreadsheet that produced the only answer Ben needed to hear. Turns out, one of their internal side-projects was quietly generating more money than all of the agency’s consulting projects, combined.

Anderson says he wishes that recommender systems would get better at surfacing niche content, rather than fueling rich-get-richer effects. Yet, in response to those who point out that we’re living in a world that is more hit-driven than ever, Anderson says people may have gotten excited by the idea that the Long Tail era was the end of the blockbuster — but he never actually said that. He says, “It was the end of the monopoly of the blockbuster.”

Making matters worse for creators is that blockbusters continue to leave niche products in the dust, particularly in the entertainment industry. The Harvard Business School economist Anita Elberse has amassed and presented data showing that digital distribution has actually made blockbusters a better business bet than ever. For one thing, recommender systems haven’t lived up to their early promise, such that Netflix (for example) still keeps pushing its already popular shows and movies, rather than ones that cater to your idiosyncratic tastes.

Unfortunately, running a web design agency proved to be less about your prowess in design and more about how flawless you sounded over the phone. Agencies often attract the most whimsical business, where clients’ opinions replace real KPIs and a soothing voice can be more important than a moving product. Naturally, a group of introverted, caring designers called the Rocket Science Group didn’t thrive in an environment that rewarded appearances over substance.

Five years passed, and the hamster wheel of unfulfilling client work was about done soothing Ben into a self-employed existence of a stagnating agency owner. The revenues were locked into a stubborn plateau and the team was exhausted by a potent mix of uncertainty and punishing workload. The very meaning of this masochistic lifestyle was put into question.

Today, Anderson, who is now the CEO of 3D Robotics, says he is sympathetic to the creators and maintains that any disappointment they’ve experienced comes from a fundamental misreading of the book, which never promised that artists could make money in the Long Tail. Rather, he wrote from the beginning that the real money would go to the aggregators — the companies who could reap the rewards from the entire area under the long-tail curve, not the narrow vertical slices representing each creator.

Anderson says he wishes that recommender systems would get better at surfacing niche content, rather than fueling rich-get-richer effects. Yet, in response to those who point out that we’re living in a world that is more hit-driven than ever, Anderson says people may have gotten excited by the idea that the Long Tail era was the end of the blockbuster — but he never actually said that. He says, “It was the end of the monopoly of the blockbuster.”