The Long Tail …

Popularity: 80%

Lately, I have been reading a lot about the “Long Tail” of everything. The phrase - The Long Tail - was first used by Wired Magazine’s editor Chris Anderson. The concept drew in part from an influential essay by Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality” that noted that a relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but “the long tail” of millions of weblogs may have only a handful of links going into them. Anderson went on to extend on that same idea by drawing a perspective on the effects of the long tail on current and future business models.

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include the online retailer Amazon.com and the online video rental service Netflix. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, successfully tapping in to that long tail market is often enabled by the distribution and sales channel opportunities the Internet creates.

What I found more interesting was a blog post by Excite.com co-founder Joe Kraus. Joe’s post was specifically on “the long tail of software“. Joe’s explanation of - how excite failed to capitalize on the long tail of search engine traffic and how Google became what it is today by figuring out exactly how to do that - is absolutely brilliant ! I strongly advice you download the presentation done by Joe, its a pitch for JotSpot.com, but worth going through.

Commentary : After having immersed myself in the idea of “selling to millions of markets of dozens rather than dozens of markets of millions” , I am drawing examples from almost everything I do. I can now relate to the ‘long tail’ experience even when I look at my blog traffic stats ! I suggest you read the post and you’ll soon be able to do the same.

2 Comments so far

Google Laps Up JotSpot … » Saumil’s Babble Belt

[…] Remember my post from coupla months back on the subject of “The Long Tail“? Well, if you do, I am sure you can also remember my fondness for Joe Kraus’s idea about the ‘Long Tail of Software’ and especially his PowerPoint pitch for his company JotSpot.com […]

November 2, 2006

Ad:Tech London 2006 … » Saumil’s Babble Belt

[…] It was also good to see people taking interest in the Long Tail of search keywords, and it was evident with the presence of two of the big players in Keyword Analysis - WordTracker and Keyword Discovery (Trellian). Being a long time customer of Wordtracker, I surely wanted to meet them. I met up with Anne Artis, of Wordtracker before playing their keyword game(I won nothin’ !). It was surely one of the most engaging talk I had that evening. Anne and myself shared our views on the current scenario of keyword analysis. I also pointed out Russell Wright’s ThemeZoom to Anne, which surprisingly she wasn’t aware of, as ThemeZoom is fast growing its LSI based keyword analysis service. I know Russell from Portalfeeder and can vouch for his offerings. We also talked about the recent attack on Jim Morris’s Nichebot and SitePoint; and how it affected the keyword service providers. (Nothin’ major! thou) All in all, it was time well spent. In the end, Anne even gave me a Wordtracker T-shirt which says “Amateurs Guess, Wordtracker Knows”. Thank You, Anne ! […]

November 15, 2006