Oh sure, there's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically won't steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit. 当然，这里面也有很多垃圾。不过，即使是流行的专辑，一样难免会有垃圾。听CD的时候，人们不得不跳过那些难听的曲目；而在网络上，人们则可以借助于群体选择的过滤作用轻易地避开那些垃圾。一首难听的曲目，如果刻在一张价值15美元的专辑里，就要白白花掉你大概十二分之一的价钱；但如果放在网络的某个服务器上，则没有什么危害——在一个曲目凭其自身价值来推销自己的市场中，这样的曲目根本得不到人们的注意。
What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales." 长尾真正令人吃惊之处在于它的数量。将长尾上足够的非流行累加起来，就会形成一个比流行还要大的市场。以图书为例：Barnes & Noble 的平均上架书目为13万种。而Amazon有超过一半的销售量都来自于在它排行榜上位于13万名开外的图书。如果以Amazon的统计数据为依据的话，这就意味着那些不在一般书店里出售的图书要比那些摆在书店书架上的图书形成的市场更大。也就是说，如果我们能够摆脱资源稀缺的限制，潜在的图书市场将至少是目前的两倍大。曾在音乐行业担任过顾问的风险投资家Kevin Laws 是这样总结这一现象的：“最大的财富孕育自最小的销售。”
The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger. 这个结论对于娱乐业的所有其它领域或多或少也都是适用的。就拿网上销售和传统销售比较来说：Blockbuster 平均只能提供不到3000个DVD；而 Netflix 有1/5的出租量来自于其排行榜3000以外的内容。Rhapsody 每月被下载的歌曲中，在排行榜1万名以外的曲目甚至超过了在排行榜前1万名的曲目。在每一个例子里，那些传统的实体零售商们所无法触及的市场是巨大的，并且还在变得越来越大。
When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well - niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones. 当你仔细思考这个问题的时候，你会发现互联网上最成功的商业都是以某种方式整合了长尾市场。例如，Google 的大多数收入来自于小广告客户（广告的长尾）；eBay 也是如此，众多细分市场以及只出售一件的商品形成了它的长尾。正如 Rhapsody 和 Amazon 一样，通过克服地域和规模的限制，Google 和 eBay 也成功地开拓了新的市场并同时拓展了现有的业务。
This is the power of the Long Tail. The companies at the vanguard of it are showing the way with three big lessons. Call them the new rules for the new entertainment economy. 这就是长尾的力量。从那些先行者们那里我们可以学到三条重要的经验，我们将之称为新娱乐经济的新规则。
Rule 1: Make everything available 规则1：要应有尽有
If you love documentaries, Blockbuster is not for you. Nor is any other video store - there are too many documentaries, and they sell too poorly to justify stocking more than a few dozen of them on physical shelves. Instead, you'll want to join Netflix, which offers more than a thousand documentaries - because it can. Such profligacy is giving a boost to the documentary business; last year, Netflix accounted for half of all US rental revenue for Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary about a family destroyed by allegations of pedophilia.
如果你喜欢纪录片，Blockbuster 是不能满足你的。事实上，任何一家影像店都不能——现存的纪录片实在太多了，而它们的销售业绩又是如此糟糕，没有谁会在自己的货架上摆上几十张这样的片子的。不过，你可以加入Netflix，在那里你能找到上千部纪录片。因为Netflix的商业模式使出租纪录片成为可能。这样的大手笔给了纪录片行业一个振兴的机会。在去年，抓住弗雷德曼一家（Capturing the Friedmans）这部纪录片在全美租赁收入当中有超过一半来自于Netflix 。这部影片讲述了一个家庭被恋童癖指控所摧毁的实事。
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who's something of a documentary buff, took this newfound clout to PBS, which had produced Daughter From Danang, a documentary about the children of US soldiers and Vietnamese women. In 2002, the film was nominated for an Oscar and was named best documentary at Sundance, but PBS had no plans to release it on DVD. Hastings offered to handle the manufacturing and distribution if PBS would make it available as a Netflix exclusive. Now Daughter From Danang consistently ranks in the top 15 on Netflix documentary charts. That amounts to a market of tens of thousands of documentary renters that did not otherwise exist. Netflix 的首席执行官 Reed Hastings 是一个纪录片爱好者。他把这一令人震惊的新发现同美国公共广播公司PBS 进行了交流，后者制作过一部关于美国士兵和越南妇女所生育的孩子的纪录片——《美国女儿越南妈妈》（Daughter From Danang）。该片曾在2002年获得奥斯卡提名并赢得圣丹斯（Sundance）电影节最佳纪录片奖。但是当时PBS并不打算发行 DVD 版本。Hastings 承诺负责DVD的生产和分销，条件是 Netflix 拥有该片的独家授权。现在，《美国女儿越南妈妈》一片在 Netflix 的纪录片排行榜上始终列在前15名里。这可意味着一个租赁者数量达到数万的市场。如果没有 Netflix，这样的市场根本是不会存在的。
There are any number of equally attractive genres and subgenres neglected by the traditional DVD channels: foreign films, anime, independent movies, British television dramas, old American TV sitcoms. These underserved markets make up a big chunk of Netflix rentals. Bollywood alone accounts for nearly 100,000 rentals each month. The availability of offbeat content drives new customers to Netflix - and anything that cuts the cost of customer acquisition is gold for a subscription business. Thus the company's first lesson: Embrace niches. 还有许多具有同样吸引力的题材或细分题材以往被传统的DVD 渠道所忽视了：像是外国片、动画片、独立制作电影、英国肥皂剧、老式的美国情景喜剧，等等。这些被忽视的市场组成了 Netflix 租赁业务的巨大一块。光是宝莱坞（Bollywood，是印度的著名电影业基地）一块，每月的出租量就接近10万。由于能够找到各种稀奇古怪的片子，新的顾客蜂拥而至——对于订阅服务业来说，能够不花钱而吸引到大量用户，这无疑比金子还珍贵。所以，这第一课就是：抓紧那些细分市场。
Netflix has made a good business out of what's unprofitable fare in movie theaters and video rental shops because it can aggregate dispersed audiences. It doesn't matter if the several thousand people who rent Doctor Who episodes each month are in one city or spread, one per town, across the country - the economics are the same to Netflix. It has, in short, broken the tyranny of physical space. What matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere. 那些电影院和影像店无法获利的事业，Netflix 却做得非常成功，原因就在于它能把分散的用户聚集起来。它根本就不介意那几千名想租神秘博士（Doctor Who）的人们是居住在同一个城市里，还是零零散散地分布在全国各地——对于Netflix 来说，它们的经济学意义是一样的。Netflix 冲破了物理空间的束缚。它所真正关心的，既不是顾客们分布在哪里，甚至也不是有多少顾客会对某一特殊的片子感兴趣，而是只要有需求就可以了，至于在哪里都无所谓。
As a result, almost anything is worth offering on the off chance it will find a buyer. This is the opposite of the way the entertainment industry now thinks. Today, the decision about whether or when to release an old film on DVD is based on estimates of demand, availability of extras such as commentary and additional material, and marketing opportunities such as anniversaries, awards, and generational windows (Disney briefly rereleases its classics every 10 years or so as a new wave of kids come of age). It's a high bar, which is why only a fraction of movies ever made are available on DVD. 结果就是，任何东西，只要有一点点的机会能够找到买主，就有存在的价值。这与当前的娱乐业的看法是截然不同的。今天，一部老片子是否以及什么时候出DVD是由若干因素决定的，包括需求估计，幕后花絮等附加资料是否存在，以及周年纪念或是颁奖或是每一代人的时间跨度（迪斯尼基本上每十年发行一次它的经典之作因为新一代儿童成为了观众）等等推销时机。这些条件形成了一个很高的门槛，这就是为什么只有很少一部分的电影制成了DVD。
That model may make sense for the true classics, but it's way too much fuss for everything else. The Long Tail approach, by contrast, is to simply dump huge chunks of the archive onto bare-bones DVDs, without any extras or marketing. Call it the Silver Series and charge half the price. Same for independent films. This year, nearly 6,000 movies were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. Of those, 255 were accepted, and just two dozen have been picked up for distribution; to see the others, you had to be there. Why not release all 255 on DVD each year as part of a discount Sundance Series?In a Long Tail economy, it's more expensive to evaluate than to release. Just do it! 也许对于真正的经典来说，这种模式是有一定道理的。但是对于绝大多数的其它作品来说，这样做未免无事生事了。而与此相对的是，在长尾模式中，只需要把这些内容简单地刻成 DVD 就成了，也不需要有什么附加资料或是推销时机。就把这些 DVD 称为银色系列好了，并且只收正常DVD一半的价钱。独立制片的作品也可以这么办。今年，有将近6千部电影被送交到圣丹斯电影节。其中只有255部被接受了，而这里面又只有二十几部片子被选中发行。想看其它的片子，你就必须亲自参加电影节了。为什么不每年把所有的255部片子都制成 DVD并作为圣丹斯系列打折发行呢？在长尾经济里，评估一部片子比发行其DVD 要更费钱。所以，请尽管做就好了！
