The Internet’s Long Tail Illusion
One of the great promises of the Internet was that it helps the long tail, the things that only a few people care about. Since everybody can publish online, all voices are there to hear. I throughly believed that from my first days on the WWW in 1995 until a couple of days ago.
Thanks to the Medium paywall discussions, I started to reflect on things. I tend to clap on Medium a lot when I get emotional, which happens with articles that I think deserve more attention. But I hardly clap for an article that gives me new insights that I first have to digest. Why should I? I am not yet sure what I should think about it. It may be true, it may be fake. It may turn out to matter or disappear into irrelevance. No reason to expose myself publicly. The same goes for liking, tweeting and sharing.
At Obermatt, we learned this lesson the hard way over the past few years: Our readers don’t share our stock research, they rather keep it to themselves. The same must be true for other sober topics: While you may like information about staying healthy in life, you don’t typically “like” or share it.
The Great Internet Bug
The fundamental flaw of the Internet is its organisation around what can be measured. The great content aggregators, Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have algorithms that are based on what you read, watch, like and share. This ignores all information that matters to us but doesn’t create reads, likes and shares.
Thoughts cannot be measured. But they matter a lot.
This is what we learned with our stock research site where visitors only spend one or two minutes on each page just to move on to the next information necessary for their stock purchase decision. While it is our very intention to help our visitors to be fast, Google sees our short session spans as a failure. We loose against good story tellers that capture visitors emotionally, make them spend time and prompt for likes and shares. The result: Our website Obermatt only grows at 60% per year while it should be growing at 140% to 160%. For us, this gap turned out to be impossible to bridge.
A Rabbit Instead of a Crocodile
The Internet’s long tail content is too uneventful to be recognised in the ever larger body of the stuff that captures people emotionally: sex, crime, accidents and lies. The long tail of the Internet, things like research, knowledge (apart from how-to information) and diversity of all kinds, which made the Internet beautiful at its beginnings, is buried ever more under all the view and click driven traffic that dominates most social networks.
Google makes the same mistakes. You only get the long tail of the Internet if you specifically search for it — and know exactly how to do this. But if you don’t know the terms of what is of interest to you, you will never see it. This is the case of most new insights. If they were known, they wouldn’t be new.
The Internet should be more like a crocodile where the tail is strong and matters a lot, not like a rabbit where you can hardly see it.
Take it or leave it
It used to be easy to evade emotion grabbing news. We just didn’t read the boulevard press, we opted for smarter alternatives. This is still possible today but at a high cost. If you just read the paid content, you loose all the great free stuff. It is like having to drive on toll roads all the time without being able to use the highway. You will miss a lot of good things on your journey.
Medium offers a new path, it helps us find the good reads even if they don’t generate claps and shares — thanks to curation. I applaud it for that. But that’s not enough. We need a Large, not just a Medium, a service that does for the entire Internet, what Medium does for stories: Curating the Internet for us to find the long tail if it matters.
We used to have it. It was called Yahoo!, RIP 2015. We need this back.
