Chris Anderson on the Age of Abundance Versus the Age of Scarcity

Chris Anderson discusses the end of the age of scarcity and the dawn of the age of abundance, which he sees as being fostered by digitization. When the cost of generating and dissemination of content -- whether words, art or music -- diminishes to nearly nothing, and storage space becomes nearly infinite and is also reduced to nothing, this changes who the target market is for retailers and what the "payoff" is for the producer.

In such an environment it costs retailers nothing to "stock" content for fringe tastes and interests and the shelf life of content is limitless.

Abundance thinking, Anderson says, creates far more options for consumers and a strong incentive for retailers to target niche markets that previously would not have been profitable for them. It also, Anderson argues, encourages producers to pursue their passions rather than only producing that which would appeal to a mass audience at the center of a bell curve.

This means a shift from thinking in terms of scarcity and "hits" to thinking in terms of abundance and niches. It means a shift from focusing on what is common and non-offensive to what appeals to a more specialized taste, embraced by fans who are passionate about what you are offering them and who have a higher sense of engagement and identification with the product or service than is the case with products and services that attempt to appeal, inoffensively, to a mass audience.

Under this new paradigm the decisions are made by the client or consumer rather than the producer and service provider -- the producer no longer tries to guess what the consumer will want and filter out what will not appeal to the consumer, rather the producer throws an almost infinite amount of content out to the public, and allows that content to find its niche in the "long tail" at the extreme ends of the bell curve.

In terms of social implications, Anderson argues that this signifies a shift from a common but superficial culture of broad appeal to narrower but deeper cultures meeting the needs of specific tastes.

Anderson argues that in the past one would focus on 20% of potential content, which would account for 80% of total sales, while ignoring 80% of the other content that was out there. By contrast, he says, in the digital world there is an incentive to include the previously neglected 80% of content, that might only account for 20% of sales, because every sale is total gain for the producer and retailer and the interests of the fringe, on either side of the bell curve, may now be met.