Skip to content

Quotes from The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More — Chris Anderson

born 1961 United States

← All quotes by Chris Anderson

19 quotes

Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Talent is not universal but it is widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distributions, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Broadly, the Long Tail is about abundance. Abundant shelf space, abundant distribution, abundant choice.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king. (Chris Anderson quoting Rob Reid)

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to becoming mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a thousand little indulgences that sets us apart from others.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Chris Anderson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.