How finely can you slice aggregation?
As I mentioned in the previous post, the three main Long Tail business opportunities are:
1. Long Tail aggregators (that include both the head and tail of content and products)
2. Niche suppliers/producers (who get aggregated by someone else)
3. Filters (which help people find what they want)
Most of the examples I’ve been using to date, such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, fall into the first of these categories, aggregation. But as the smart kids in the front row always point out, there’s a seeming paradox at work in that category.
The Long Tail is all about the shift from hits to niches. But aren’t all those aggregators “hits”? They’re not only the largest players in their category, but they seem to be getting even larger, gaining market share at the expense of their competitors. Is there something about aggregators that tends to favor a few big winners, even as the other two categories fragment into a million niches of varying size?