I've just been reading Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search It occured to me that if Chris Andersen can create a speaking career out of "The Long Tail", somebody ought to be able to do the same out of "The Fat Middle"! There is a rich mine of discussion to be had about what it means and how to exploit it.

Just briefly, The Short Head is getting shorter and lower but the incumbents are usually unassailable in the medium term. And even though they've got all the concentration of money, getting your hands on it is hard work. The Long Tail is getting longer and longer while individual entries get less and less attention. If you can build systems that can handle the volume of entries and make money from the small sales per entry, there's gold out there. But it's damn hard to get at. And you need to be Amazon or eBay to exploit it. Where most of us work and where most of us end up when we're moderately successful is The Fat Middle. If you can pick a good niche and dominate it, there's relatively easy money to be made. It's also the area where the most churn happens, entries are boiling up out of the Long Tail, finding their place in the Fat Middle and then falling back again all the time.

So there you go. A quick search for "The Fat Middle" and thefatmiddle.com turned up almost nothing. You read it here first, if it gets traction, remember me!


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[ 14-Feb-06 6:29pm ] [ , , ]