wanderingstan

What it shows is the discrepincy between actual movie revenue and what would be predicted by a power law function. As movies get less popular (as you move down the movie-ranking), you would expect to see a logrithmic drop-off in revenue. Instead, once you pass the top 100 movies, you see a sharp drop off. This is because movies beyond the top 100 just don’t get shown. It’s not worth it to the theatres.

So that’s cool.

But I was thinking, “What would a movie look like that grossed $10??”

The answer is YouTube. Even the worst of these little movies will generate at least a little ad revenue. Especially considering their essentially infinite lifetime. That’s the the red bit I’ve colored in.

So here’s a convergence of the attention economy, Web 2.0 and the long tail: Items for sale at the far end of the long tale are cheap enough that you can sell them for merely attention. (Even given today’s crude methods of converting attention to dollars: AdSense and banner ads.)

Ah, so here are the micropayments everyone was talking about 10 years ago.

The Imminent Doom of YouTube is a user-made faux-conspiracy documentary about MySpace attempting to take over YouTube. The telling quote comes at the very end when the announcer warns us:

…Only then can we distract enough attention from them [the MySpace plants]. Only then will YouTube survive.

What’s amazing to me is that the 19 year old creator so naturally understands that in the online world, attention equals survival. The more radical notions of Goldhaber’s attention economy will not seem so radical in a few years.