The Long Tail - Chris Anderson

The long tail article by Anderson, covered how the media and entertainment industries will succeed not by pushing only mass market hits that are popular among many but by also mining the "long tail" of interest among a few in less-popular books, songs, movies and more. As we discussed in class that top 20% in any market makes more profit than the other 80%, however Anderson in his article says, that the other 80% can create as much profit as the top 20%. Sure, maybe thousands want to buy a hit song. But add up all those who want to buy lesser-known titles, and they might generate as much or more revenue than the hits themselves. As a merchant, you want to tap into both the "head" of interest and the "long tail" that follows behind. The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We're stuck in a hit-driven mindset - we think that if something isn't a hit, it won't make money and so won't return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. Like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the "misses" usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.

The tail makes much more sense when you see charts that illustrate it, such as the one below:

The point I was explaining in that article is that there are a large number of queries that happen far less often than the "leading" terms like "hit song" or "just a song" at the head of the list. Most queries form the long tail that's illustrated behind the head. Tap into the tail, and you've got sizable traffic, as well as traffic that often is reported to convert better than less general terms.

In other words, search has a long tail too. While it might not be new to search, it's certainly great to have the tail becoming more popularized in general. That's because it will further help those search marketers who mistakenly fixate on only the most popular terms to realize they need to consider the tail as well.