Giant Pools of Content: Theorizing Aggregation in Online Media Distribution

It has been fifteen years since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first introduced the concept of the "long tail" for describing how the contemporary online media environment was reshaping the production and consumption of media content and other cultural products.¹ In economic terms, the basic premise of the long tail is that the internet lowers the barriers to entry found in traditional media distribution, such as channel capacity constraints in radio and television broadcasting, shelf-space limitations in physical bricks-andmortar retail stores, and editorial gatekeepers. Online, any and all content can be made available regardless of its origins or popularity, and digital search technology and recommendation systems allow audiences to discover niche and otherwise obscure content. Thus, circa 2004, Anderson's long-tail theory posited that our economy and culture were shifting away from a model of mass media that focused on a relatively small number of mainstream "hits" at the head of the product demand curve and toward a huge number of niche products and markets in the tail (hence, the "long tail"). It suggests that the potential combined audience size for niche, low-popularity content may someday rival that of the large audiences for popular mass media content. At its core, the concept of the long tail—much like Tim O'Reilly's contemporaneous Web 2.0 concept—was a business model, conceived of as a solution to the failures of web commerce during the earlier dot-com era (1995–2001).² Nevertheless, the long-tail concept carried deep cultural significance, promising to democratize and diversify the production and consumption of media.

Yet the niche marketing phenomenon that Anderson described in 2004 was hardly new. He was simply articulating a new way for online businesses to strategize and monetize their offerings. The niche media producers and content that populated the long tail always existed; they just were not economically advantageous in a mass media economy. Moreover, the means for distributing and accessing these cultural products online had been developing for a decade. In Anderson's original 2004 Wired essay, he points to digital platforms like Amazon, Netflix, Apple iTunes, and Rhapsody, some of which dated to the mid-1990s. These were online retailers and media subscription services that all operated off one central principle: content aggregation.

In this essay, I historicize the concept of aggregation by tracing the rise of the web portal, specifically highlighting audio media and the case of AudioNet (later Broadcast.com). AudioNet innovated the vertical portal idea for audio and video content in the late 1990s, signaling a shift toward aggregation as the primary distribution model in the digital media industries. By "content aggregation," I am referring to the practice of pulling media content from various sources and making it accessible at one dedicated, easy-to-find location. Nearly all the major digital media companies and platforms of the post-1990 web era operate through principles of aggregation: Google, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, iTunes, and even social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. Aggregation lies at the heart of one of the great promises of the internet: the ability of individuals to access whatever they want, whenever and wherever they want.³ Tied up in these utopian visions are metaphors of abundance, prosperity, and democratization.

Historically, modern computing and the internet are founded on the principle of abundance (and overabundance). Vannevar Bush's key observation, articulated in his prescient 1945 article "As We May Think," was that, although the scientific community was producing a trove of vital research and information, it was becoming impossible for researchers to sort through this immense maze of information and make practical use of it.⁴ He argued that scientists had a responsibility to share their research more widely and to find ways to make knowledge more accessible, to give individuals more control over information. Bush's solution to these problems of information overabundance and inaccessibility was computer-like machines, such as his theoretical Memex (or memory extender), which could enhance collaboration and perform functions such as compression, storage, and retrieval.⁵ During the 1960s and 1970s, the internet followed this...