The long tail phenomenon tells us what is going on here.

In the olden days, to watch video, you only had a few channels, and so HIT PRODUCTS were the critical factor. You could only offer a few thousand VHS videos in a store, and so to sell the most, you concentrated on hits.

This is the mentality that values the most viewed. But in the Internet era, the most doesn't count like it used to. Because unlike the olden days, the hundreds of thousands of videos NOT on the most viewed list are watched MUCH MORE than those on the list.

The MOST VIEWED list represents media's PAST. Yes, in order to get a million views you probably have to be connected to the old media, because that is still where people take a lot of their cues, and there is money chasing those eyeballs, either to produce the content or to promote it. The MOST LINKED list really represents the PRESENT. Those are the videos that are getting attention without big money chasing them. They will eventually win. The MOST DISCUSSED list represents the FUTURE. Those are the videos that somebody cared enough about to actually comment on.

Lastly, the MOST VIEWED for THIS MONTH appears to be heavily biased in favor of old media-related content. Sure, the old media has just gotten the sledgehammer wakeup call during the last three months. But look what happens when you change the view to most viewed of all time. Or the most viewed this week. Whuh-oh!

$15000 and they go cheap by not rewiring your house for proper ethernet... they just use power line networking in which you get 14mpbs, which is kinda poor. Even 802.11g is faster, but apparently $15k doesn't come with wireless networking. Pay the kid down the street.

This is a "long tail" situation. Wired editor Chris Anderson explains it in his new book, but if you google "long tail" you'll find the Wikipedia entry and the original Wired article that started this line of thinking. We are no longer in a culture that supports the traditional "blockbuster". Choice is *everything* now, which is why it'll continue to be more and more expensive to motivate people to choose one of ten movies on any particular night. This is a long-term trend and our ability to communicate is only going to accelerate it. The good news is that the theatre system can support more choices. My local plex has 24 rooms. Each room can run 6 films a day. Each week has 7 days. Therefore my local plex has the ability to show 1008 different films in a week. They show 17. 17, and all of them are aimed at the same demographic, which is "everybody". You can easily understand this if you consider what's happening to FM Radio. (And please: everything that's happening to the music industry is going to happen to the film industry in five years.) FM radio is very much like the local 17-film-showing multiplex. Each city can support about 20-30 FM stations. When our culture was more common, more centered, 20 channels was enough. Now that our interests are more narrow, not one of those 20 channels is acceptable. They are all trying to get "everybody" to listen. But in an era of non-scarcity, in a culture that worships individuality and choice, anything aimed at "everybody" is going to hit nobody. The other problem: in a choice culture, everything requires word of mouth. Consider the film "Serenity". It is still being watched by new enthusiasts ("highly motivated consumers") due to word of mouth. It will approach "blockbuster" status over the course of years, not weeks. But its initial box office was a disappointment. Well sure; how can word of mouth operate in two weeks? What if, instead, "Serenity" was shown at the local plex for a year, in the Tuesday afternoon slot? Now we're addressing the true needs of that word-of-mouth group WHOSE MARKETING COSTS ARE ZERO. ($0.00) The film will of course be available for home consumption during most of its theater run. (But that has to be addressed anyway!) The theater experience is improving, and is still a better way to consume a film for 99% of people, and provides an outlet and unique semi-social experience out of the house. I don't think the theater experience is the root problem. I think it's still choice. Of course, the other side of the equation is film production. Remember that everything that happened in the music industry is going to happen in the film industry. Independent musicians are in an interesting place today. It costs about $5000 to record an album as sonically good, or better, than albums costing $1M to make 25 years ago. That means that, right now, there are tens of thousands of acts with CDs sounding as good as LPs did 25 years ago. Wow! You can go and kind of browse them on Garageband or Myspace. Only 1 in 20 don't utterly suck, but that 1 in 20 are kind of amazing (and 1 in 100 are really great)! The numbers get remarkable when you pause to consider them. This same sort of revolution is starting with the YouTubers, but that's a whole different media. Cheap production is going to enable more long-tail thinking; cheap distribution will force it to happen no matter what. This cultural tidal wave is inevitable and you MUST not try to fight it by paddling harder upstream. Thanks for reading, good luck!

Sure, it's *possible* that sportsbybrooks.com and antiwar.com get more audience than Instapundit. *snort*