The Long Tail
January 8, 2006
OK, I’m slow sometimes. I finally got around to reading Chris Anderson’s article, “The Long Tail,” some fifteen months after it first appeared and 10 months after Frank Gilbane commented on its relevence to enterprise software. It had caught on enough that I understood the basic idea, but the article is definitely worth reading, as is Anderson’s blog. I find myself agreeing with the overall premise and a lot of his ideas, but he is enamored of some things that I am not terribly impressed with. Google Print comes up again and again, and all I can conclude about Google Print is that the search is only decent, the navigation frustrating, and the page rendering is often abysmal (see here, here, and here for examples I found in a couple of minutes of random searching, and I have seen worse). I look at Google Print as a potential model that can exploit the long tail, but a crude and early attempt at something that will be done much better in the future—either by a later version of this product or an entirely different product. Of course, Yahoo and others are in the game too, and publishers such as Random House and Harper Collins seem to want to take things into their own hands. And while the details of these books-on-demand models get worked out, I am sure Anderson will be most directly pleased if you simply buy his upcoming book.
Apart from my nitpicks about some of Anderson’s examples, the ideas are important—and I think very important for publishers. Anderson says it best himself in the original article (bolded emphasis mine):
What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail”). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.”
I hear this in different ways all the time from publishers who are ahead of the curve in electronic distribution of their content. Journal publishers who provide sales of single articles have found customers who would never have bought an entire subscription. Speciality publishers who have digitized old manuscripts and back issues of publications are finding small but whole new audiences for their content. The examples—and Anderson’s ideas—are compelling and instructive.
Posted by Bill Trippe at January 8, 2006 6:00 PM
