Logicbank Media

Venture  Blog as an interesting article about the economics of the Long Tail curve and how it relates to content aggregation and filtering.  Content aggregators amass as much content as possible, regardless of its mass market popularity or niche focus, in order to establish “one stop” online shop.

The value to consumers from these content aggregators is that they need not shop in dozens of places on the web in order to acquire a diverse set of content. As a result, aggregators are able to extract a disproportionate amount of value for the sale of each individual piece of content. And while creators are likely to sell slightly more content as a result of the increased ease of salability, they will not likely emerge from the obscurity of the Tail merely because they are made available for sale on Amazon or iTunes.

The author argues that aggregation must be combined with filtering in order to “help consumers fully appreciate and navigate the breadth of the content they have to offer. ”

While the search engine in the purest form of filter, its generalized nature means that its effectiveness is reduced as content becomes increasingly “obscure”.  Hence, the rise of industry specific vertical search engines and various user driven collaborative filtering efforts.

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