{"id":890,"date":"2007-09-27T19:22:39","date_gmt":"2007-09-28T01:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=890"},"modified":"2007-09-27T19:22:39","modified_gmt":"2007-09-28T01:22:39","slug":"a_cautionary_ta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=890","title":{"rendered":"A cautionary tale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On his blog, Chris Anderson shares <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelongtail.com\/the_long_tail\/2007\/09\/an-independent-.html\">an email<\/a> he received from an independent filmmaker who, after an initial burst of enthusiasm about making a living in the long-tail economy, has come to the hard realization that the monetary rewards of being a long-tail producer are sparse, as the riches are funneled to the large companies able to aggregate content or advertising:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When first purchased, your book opened my eyes and got me quite excited about this &#8220;Long Tail&#8221; segment of the economy.  While my eyes continue to be opened and I continue to be in learning mode, unfortunately the excitement over this Long Tail has faded away as &#8220;reality&#8221; has set in. My reality as a content creator and producer is that it is basically not possible for anyone in the &#8220;normal&#8221; realm to make a living in this Long Tail space &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER.  But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom.  Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.  I&#8217;m left with a bad taste in my mouth&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Welcome to the world of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/archives\/2006\/12\/sharecropping_t.php\">digital sharecropping<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On his blog, Chris Anderson shares an email he received from an independent filmmaker who, after an initial burst of enthusiasm about making a living in the long-tail economy, has come to the hard realization that the monetary rewards of being a long-tail producer are sparse, as the riches are funneled to the large companies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}