Real Hourly Earnings

Market Observations

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail: "What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?'

Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We've been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto's principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books - 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But the right answer, says Vann-Adib�, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried."

Fogel points to accelerating technological change

TCS: Tech Central Station - The Great Escape: "Nick Schulz: On the subject of techno-physio evolution, you say in the book that, 'this evolution is likely to accelerate in this century.' Why is that?



Robert Fogel: Well, first of all, our technology is accelerating.



Nick Schulz: How do you measure that? How do you know that it's accelerating?



Robert Fogel: Well in the book I give a diagram and show it visually. I have on the Y axis, the size of the population; and on the other axis, time. And I show the curve of population -- from about 1700 on, that curve becomes almost vertical on the scale that's shown in the book. And then along that scale, I put in scientific innovations.



One of the points I make is that it took 4000 years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse. And it took 65 years to go from the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine to landing a man on the moon. Not only did that happen in such a short period of time, but over a billion people all over the world watched it happen. So we had communications revolution in a very short period of time. I could work out a precise metric but it wouldn't mean much. It wouldn't give you more information than that diagram does.

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