The Long Tail

What is the Long Tail?

The Long Tail focuses on how our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits", such as, mainstream products and markets at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niche markets in the tail.  As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

What Long tail isn’t?

There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for "fringe". Invoking the Long Tail is not a magic wand to explain away the apparent lack of demand for what you've got.  The Long Tail is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor-selling product. Or weak sectors. Or bad ideas.

What can is it used for?

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demands for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The drive to build a market and obtain revenue from the consumer demographic of the long tail has led businesses to implement a series of long-tail marketing techniques, most of them based on extensive use of internet technologies. Among the most representative are Viral marketing: The intentional spreading of marketing messages using pre-existing social networks, with an emphasis on the casual, non-intentional and low cost, commonly through YouTube videos, viral emails and standalone microsites. Including eBay (auctions), Yahoo! and Google (web search), Amazon (retail), and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and Netflix (video rental).

Why is the Long tail important for the media?

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

What is the effect s of online access?

In his Wired article, Chris Anderson cites earlier research, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They found that a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales come from obscure books that were not available in brick-and-mortar stores.

They then quantified the potential value of the Long Tail to consumers. In an article published in 2003, these authors showed that, while most of the discussion about the value of the Internet to consumers has revolved around lower prices, consumer benefit (a.k.a. consumer surplus) from access to increased product variety in online book stores is ten times larger than their benefit from access to lower prices online. Thus, the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the Long Tail.