[This is the first part of this post. You can find the second part here].

Near one year ago, Scott Karp published a similar titled article making a very important point about how the long tail applies to content creation but not to revenue distribution:

If the "long tail" is the organizing principle of web/media 2.0, why shouldn't we expect revenue distribution to follow the same pattern, with a handful of companies (i.e. Google, Yahoo) controlling most of the revenue and the remaining online players fighting over the crumbs? When Google found a way to monetize the long tail through AdSense, it became the "head" of a new long tail. We shouldn't mistake long tail economics to mean that everyone will get a share of the wealth.

Scott graphed a bunch of online rankings discovering again ad again a long tail distribution in unique visitors to the top 50 US sites, inside the spending by the top 50 online advertisers, the number of sites linking to the top 50 blogs, etc.

Of course the single most important graph would be the top 50 sites by revenue. While we don't actually have real data to draw that graph, Scott states:

Long tail economics means that companies can make a lot of money off the tail, but it doesn't mean that the tail itself can make any money.

..that strategy will work for a lucky few, and the rest of the tail will toil on in service to the head's profits (see AdSense).

Web 2.0 has democratize the Web in terms of voice but not in terms of dollars.

This is the recurring topic about the Sharecropping the long tail .

As Nicholas Carr and Richard McManus clearly explain, the explosion of web content enabled by the drop of production and consuming cost is in turn causing a concentration of traffic and content in the hands of few (big) properties. This sites are mainly the social networks Myspace and FaceBook where million of users established their new homes online.

Again by Nicholas Carr, democratized content creation doesn't equal democratic revenue models:

putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few

So what is really concentrating is not the content but the value it creates. This value is substantially made up by the aggregation on massive scale and successive filtering of a huge quantity of atomic chunks of information:

One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it's simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

I find this dynamic interesting but I'm sure things are quickly going to change. In my opinion what we experience today is not a real long tail model for revenue distribution. This is true only for the head (big properties online) but not for the tail (users).

Yes the point here is putting sites and users on the same graph and drawing a continuous line where even the tail democratically gets a slice of the cake. This slice of course will be divided by an incredible number of information chunks and users but this can still be money on a such large ecosystem.

Sorry Scott, paraphrasing your words I believe we should intend long tail economics to mean that everyone will get a share of the wealth. A small share provided through micropayments.

This could be a few dollars or some hundred dollars but it doesn't matter. Those payments could be left online and used to buy tickets, skype account, premium services, ringtones, etc. They are the end users reward for their contributions.

And I don't buy Nicholas Carr's theory either. We are not happy sharecroppers willing to socialize. While our contributions alone could be considered negligible, they still have a value. If I put online a viral video and that video is played 100K times on a major portal, this is a tangible value and also a single post could produce some clicks on ads.

People want the authorship of their content (meant as the revenue slice and the ability to export or download that content).

Is that possible? Yes it is and the first massive example comes from Italy. Please read the part two.