If there is one thing I love, it is a mixed metaphor.
“He climbed a ladder of stability across an ocean of trouble and left footprints in the face of time.”
This glorious quote comes to us from an English writing book we used in High School, three, or five, or mumble mumble years ago. The exact year does not matter. We will move on.
It is relevant because of where we are in the world and the current timeline we are on, if you believe such things.
Today, I want to talk about the dream of The Long Tail, and more specifically, about how it is turning into the Emperor’s New Clothes.
I think that probably gives you an idea where I am going with this.
You can all go to the Wikipedia or the Google and do a history of the Long Tail. The idea is that everything keeps making money over time because the internet is forever.
While there is some truth to this, the Long Tail also has a diminishing cost to it. Eventually, it gets to the point that it is below the threshold of adding it to a balance sheet (under a penny), and some time before that, it is below the threshold of adding it to a payout (most places are 10 dollars or 100 dollars to consolidate transaction fees).
The Long Tail at that point becomes meaningless and invisible, and suddenly a joke, which is what brings us to the Emperor’s New Clothes. You can look up that story if you need to, too. Essentially, it means we were sold this miraculous world where everything keeps making money until the heat death of the universe. It is simply untrue. At some point, the content revenues fall to the point where it is not cost-effective to maintain the payment relationship, and the whole thing atrophies.
This is how we have gotten the Emperor’s New Tail, in case you were not following.
So what can we do? I thought the future was going to be abundant for everyone!
Yes and no.
The good news is that having everything available everywhere, all the time, means that at some point, a person of influence is going to talk about your stuff, or perhaps improvise a dance to it.
I present to you the song that creeps out my wife when I hum it.
It is a great tune from a great artist, and it happens to be catchy. It also happened to be used in a very creepy movie my wife regrets agreeing to watch.
TL;DR, if you are on a hiking date and you see this on your hiking partner’s playlist: Run.
Back to the E.N.T.
Everything needs to be available everywhere, even if it is sitting in the middle of the Island of Misfit Toys. Eventually, someone is going to make Fetch happen, much like “Go” was brought back into the eye of consumer-Sauron for another fifteen minutes of fame.
You will need to accept that the Long Tail is not a forever Tail, unless you have tattooed it to the face of your children, or laser-etched it to the face of the moon.
I wanted to talk about this for a few reasons.
First: If you are a game developer and you are relying on Steam to save you from being poor, you might need to spend a little more skull sweat contemplating your Make Money Fast plan. There is no place where the Emperor’s New Tail is more clearly real than the Steam catalog. Okay, sorry, that might apply to Spotify. Or Goodreads. Suffice it to say, there are lots of places where the pennies per unit creativity extraction is very bad and getting worse by the minute. If you intend to play in this playground, bring serious marketing plans, or you won’t be there for very long, if at all.
I am going to spare you the “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk about AI!” circus pitch, and why this matters. The people who need to hear the E.N.T. story are largely in the “you cannot spell horrible without AI” even though AI is not in the word horrible. I will exercise an Empathy card here and give you a pass on that subject because you just spent your last 100 dollars submitting a potential game of the year to Steam.
It doesn’t matter that you are not likely to make that money back. You bought five seconds of life for Gabe’s super-yacht, and because you are a fanboi who loves him and his 30 percent tax on your moneys after 100 dollars, that is all that matters.
The second reason I want to talk about this is that we are on the cusp of a content renaissance. At no point in history has it been easier, cheaper, or faster to create stuff that other people will want to stare at and listen to.
We are approaching a period in time where the size of the audience of consumers is going to be in the same order of magnitude as the size of the audience of creators. The walls are falling, and the ability to gate-keep this much content is nigh impossible.
We are drifting into unfamiliar space here. The rate at which stuff is changing is going to keep at a frenetic pace for the next few years.
While we want to approach the future with cautious optimism and a hope for abundance, it is also a good idea to keep the shields at maximum.
And maybe have the crew on yellow alert.
I appreciate you being patient for this post.
Thank you, as always, for your patience.
See you next week.
