He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His point was that separate niches each maintained some unique offerings, but when everything was combined together into a single market, and attention focused on certain items, there would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of options, greater than ever before, while the total number of options decreased.
"Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then, reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1 percent of today's Web audience is a million people."
I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - but I get basically the same fifty variations anywhere in the US, and much of them anywhere in the world.
Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option.
We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.
Someone once described the general difference between European and U.S. grocery stores: They said that in Europe, a store would have every kind of product, but not very many brands of any particular thing, maybe two or three for most non-staple products. But in the U.S., a store would either have like 20 brands of something or have none of them; i.e. not carry that kind of product at all. It seems to me like this points to “choice” being an important scale by which stores are measured in the U.S., but no, or little, negative associations are made with no products of a particular kind being available at all.
There's some of that European approach creeping into US markets thanks to Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud - we now have both Aldi and Trader Joe's which primarily have their own versions of products and carry only that brand (or occasionally a second 'mainstream' brand as special items). Costco is similar as well in typically having only a single brand of any given type of product.
Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent company) with very large containers taking up a lot of space for relatively little actual product, but lots of different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags that are half air, relegating other brands to lower shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half a dozen different flavors of the same brands.
And it's the same all over the US. The only variation tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets than others.
Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political example mentioning that every little local detail, now with social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the central power as small as possible.
