The Long Tail: The three-body problem
The Long Tail: The three-body problem
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired on juggling Wired, writing a book and blogging.
From About:
The Long Tail is about how the mass market is turning into a million niches. The term refers to the yellow part of the sales chart at left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the "hits", which have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways to give consumers access to them thanks to the "infnite shelf-space effect" of new distribution mechanisms that break thought the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar.
But most interesting, in this post, is data on music business:
"My thesis had been a Long Tail business (massive variety plus good filters) would show a much flatter demand curve, with a more even balance between hits and niches. And, mirabile dictu, that's exactly what this data analysis showed. Even over the same inventory, when the two data sets were normalized (hits set to the same levels) the online business showed 2x demand for niches. Overall for the same sales of the top-1,000, the online stats showed 50% higher sales of the next 19,000."
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired on juggling Wired, writing a book and blogging.
From About:
The Long Tail is about how the mass market is turning into a million niches. The term refers to the yellow part of the sales chart at left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the "hits", which have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways to give consumers access to them thanks to the "infnite shelf-space effect" of new distribution mechanisms that break thought the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar.
But most interesting, in this post, is data on music business:
"My thesis had been a Long Tail business (massive variety plus good filters) would show a much flatter demand curve, with a more even balance between hits and niches. And, mirabile dictu, that's exactly what this data analysis showed. Even over the same inventory, when the two data sets were normalized (hits set to the same levels) the online business showed 2x demand for niches. Overall for the same sales of the top-1,000, the online stats showed 50% higher sales of the next 19,000."
posted by JTH at 7:25 AM
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