Power Law in Popular Media
https://medium.com/@michaeltauberg/power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c
This article sheds light on the many industries that exhibit power laws. The author poses a question: why do power graphs seem to emerge within popular media? The answer lies in the fact that popularity is a network phenomenon. Therefore, it is subject to network effects. The power law arises, because an entry into a popular media network that gets views at first will then be more favorable to other users. For example, if a song has more views or better reviews on a music streaming site, it is more likely to be listened to by more people. This creates a rich-get-richer effect, because the works that originally are slightly more popular will get increasingly more popular until most of the industry is dominated by a select few works. This is called the Pareto Principle, which states that the top 20% of works in an industry hold 80% of the success measured in that industry. The article lists numerous examples of popular media industries that exhibit this principle. The power law thus affects media like newspapers, music, movies, books, podcasts, and video games.
This article relates to what we have recently done in class on power laws. We worked on calculating the coefficient of the power law relationship for different industries, just as the author of the article did. Additionally, the article brings up the idea of the long tail, and how this will lead to equality of opportunity in media. Since the barriers to entry to media like videos (with YouTube) and songs (with Soundcloud) are very low, there is more room for creators to output content that has a chance to go viral. However, even though it is possible for lesser-known creators to become popular, most of the success still goes to a select few who are able to take advantage of power laws to benefit from content in popular media.