dylan tweney if you're bored, you're not paying attention

Who’s wagging the long tail?

The "long tail" is digerati shorthand for the the increasing profitability of companies' backlists--the formerly neglected niche products that used to be kept in stock just in case one of them suddenly turned into a breakout hit, or because they were simply necessary to have a fully-stocked store. Now, thanks to easy searchability, it's easier than ever for customers to find these products, and some of them are becoming much more profitable than ever before. Think books, music, blogs ... in each case, the traffic/sales going to niche products overwhelms (or will soon overwhelm) that going to the "hits."

The "long tail" implies that the Internet is ushering in an age when micro-niches will dominate, at the expense of mass-culture monoliths. Sure, the Net makes it easier for us all to find the bizarre fetishes and tiny cliques that we are longing for. But one thing has always bugged me about this theory: How do you make a business out of that, unless you're a big aggregator?

John Cassidy put it very well in a recent New Yorker article, pointing out that Amazon, Google, and eBay -- all big companies -- pop up again and again in discussions of the subject:

Has the New Economy really moved past the familiar “winner take all” dynamic? That depends on whether you’re looking at the long tail—or at who’s wagging it.

In other words, sure, there's a huge proliferation of blogs on every imaginable subject under the sun. Most of those bloggers, if they're making anything at all, are making about $2.93 a month for their efforts. Chump change. The only way to make that into a business is to aggregate a million of these bloggers and take 50% of their revenues. But who can manage that trick? Hello, big companies: AOL (Weblogs, Inc.), Yahoo (Yahoo Groups), and Google (Blogger).

Suddenly the brand-new blogosphere is looking a lot more like old Big Media.

The New Yorker: "Going Long"

Google AdSense vs. AdBrite.

Just for kicks, and because AdBrite has such cute branding, I decided to check out its advertising network. I've been using Google AdSense for awhile (and just got my first $100 check from it last month, woo hoo) but I'm open to alternatives, especially if they stand a chance of making me a little dough.

So I set up a test: Using a PHP script, I've rotated AdSense and AdBrite banners on tinywords and SMS 411 for the past few weeks. Each time a page is served, my script randomly chooses an ad, so the distribution is even, giving me the ability to do straightforward A/B tests.

The results are clear: Over the same period, and on the same sites, AdSense is generating 3 times the revenue that AdBrite is. The reason is clear, when you look at the ads the two systems serve: AdSense ads are highly relevant to the adjacent content, whereas AdBrite's ads seem to have been targeted by a drunken monkey with a heavy interest in pushing credit card debt-reduction schemes.

But there's a much bigger reason AdSense has my business right now: Reporting. AdSense lets me examine a huge amount of detail on how my various ads are performing, enabling me to fine-tune ad colors, placements, and other aspects on the fly. I can compare performance on various domains, between different color ads (using custom channels), and between ads and Google product referrals.

With AdBrite, I can't do any of that. Annoyingly, AdBrite's traffic and clickthrough reports are on one page, and the earning reports are on another, separate page. AdBrite doesn't give me an easy way to check performance by CPM (I have to do my own calculations) and I can't easily check, say, the last week's or the last month's results.

The only advantage AdBrite offers is that I can use it to sell spots directly on my site, and I can set my own price for these ads. So if I thought I could regularly convince someone to pay $30 a week for a banner ad on tinywords, I would use AdBrite. But for my tiny sites (and I suspect for most "long tail" publishers) network ads -- those that are placed on my site by a computer, not a human -- are really the only option.

In this case, AdSense wins hands down. It delivers better-targeted ads, generates more money, and gives me much more data about how my sites are working. And thanks, Google, for the C-note.

Fixies.

When I was a kid, the more gears your bike had, the cooler it was. Yet San Francisco is just crawling with single-speed bikes. On closer inspection, I found that many of these bikes don't even have coaster brakes--they've got direct-drive chains. As long as the wheels are turning, the crank is turning, so you have to keep your legs moving, and you slow down by slowing down your legs. WTF??

It turns out that these fixed-gear bikes, or "fixies," are something of a trend. Last year they were, anyhow. Here's how to make a fixed-gear bike out of an old 1970s ten-speed, plus lots more info on why you might want one of these stripped-down, admittedly dangerous urban hipster rides.