Power Law in Popular Media
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9 min read
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Jun 28, 2018
“No one man should have all that power”
— Kanye West
We’ve all heard that the media business is cutthroat. In books, or movies or music, a few dominant artists tower over the rest. These superstar directors and writers and musicians sell millions of units while their peers languish in obscurity.
I wondered, are all forms of media equally competitive?
To find out, I scraped the internet for as much media data as I could find¹. To my delight and surprise, whenever I ordered things by the biggest winners, the same pattern emerged. It’s called power law, and you can see it below.
tall trees and scarce sunlight
What is Power Law?
tall trees and scarce sunlight
Have you heard of the long tail? the 80–20 rule (Pareto distribution)? Winner-take-all markets? Those are all examples of power law at work.
In technical terms, power law is just a mathematical relationship. Here’s what it looks like.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
