If you are asserting that one big power law is the sum of many little power laws, then that's not actually a fractal relationship, so no one has to go and look up fractal in wikipedia. Introducing the term, as Chris Anderson does in his sloppy Long Tail book, simply confuses the matter and gives an undeserved impression of sophistication to the argument.
So what you are left with is saying that big markets are made up of little submarkets, each of which have their own hits and misses. You've got your best-selling cookbooks, best-selling science-fiction novels, best-selling books about fractals, whatever. True enough, but so what? I fail to see that the Internet has helped the number of such submarkets to grow. I'd be interested in evidence that it has.
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Not fractal at all
If you are asserting that one big power law is the sum of many little power laws, then that's not actually a fractal relationship, so no one has to go and look up fractal in wikipedia. Introducing the term, as Chris Anderson does in his sloppy Long Tail book, simply confuses the matter and gives an undeserved impression of sophistication to the argument.
So what you are left with is saying that big markets are made up of little submarkets, each of which have their own hits and misses. You've got your best-selling cookbooks, best-selling science-fiction novels, best-selling books about fractals, whatever. True enough, but so what? I fail to see that the Internet has helped the number of such submarkets to grow. I'd be interested in evidence that it has.