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The Sometimes Fallacy of The Long Tail

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sometimes-the-snake's-head-is-what-matters dept.

There's been a lot of talk (maybe too much talk, to paraphrase Bono) about The Long Tail and how it changes everything about what people consume, how hits are made, what people want to hear, how everything big is small again -- but people have taken that perhaps too far as Lee Gomes contends in a recent blog post about hits. Lee's piece is well thought-out, and I think raises a very valid point that whereas there is value in the Long Tail idea, sometimes people take it too far and that "Hits" still count for a lot. His earlier piece is a more direct critique of The Long Tail and worth reading as well; we covered that piece about the Long Tail a couple weeks back.

5 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Is this news? by zanderredux · · Score: 5, Informative
    He's just affirming that the 80/20 rule STILL WORKS PERFECTLY.

    Bad news for hype-driven marketing and economics people, but Pareto got it right in 1897!

    1. Re:Is this news? by omnicron13 · · Score: 2, Informative

      These are all results of power laws. The fat (Pareto) tail and the 80/20 (Pareto) law are the same thing.

    2. Re:Is this news? by Sique · · Score: 2, Informative

      I would just expect it to be a hyperbolic distribution. The best renting item is rented about twice as much as the second, about three times the third one, about four times the fourth one etc.pp. (Zipf's Law). For Netflix with the 60,000 items inventory it would mean thus: Best item rents out 60,000 times (in a given time...), second best 30,000 times, third best 20,000 times etc.pp. until the last one, which was rented out on one single occasion.

      Using this we can estimate, that the first 50 items are good for about 270,000 rentals out of a total of 695,000 rentals, or about 40% of the total rentals. This is slightly more than Netflix actually reports, but for such a simple model pretty close.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  2. Re:Hit's don't go away, of course by FlyByPC · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not only that, but if consumers realize that a store is more likely to carry what they want on a regular basis -- and offers frequent-buyer perks -- then that could definitely build customer loyalty.

    --
    Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
  3. Re:Hit's don't go away, of course by cdrguru · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, but the problem is focus, promotion and marketing. You are assuming the reason things sell is they are offered. Most people in the consumer space have quite a different view - things sell because they are promoted. Just having something sitting on the shelf doesn't do much for it. Having it occupy a favorable place in the store (on an end, for instance) will significantly increase sales. People see it. They buy it.

    The problem with the online world is the "favored" positions are incredibly small. Additionally, having a larger catalog just means that when someone searches for something they are bombarded with many, many more possibilities. This actually deters people from making any choice at all. So, in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, having more potential choices reduces overall sales.

    There are some that can say that everything that is known about consumer marketing is utterly false in an online environment. So far, the results are mixed from what I have heard. We are certainly not seeing the sort of abandonment of B&M stores that was touted as "just around the corner" in the late 1990's. That might happen - or it might not - but it is likely to take at least a generation before it does. Old people, even those using the Internet, are very unlikely to abandon shopping habits formed over decades.

    This means that for the short term, most of this "long tail" stuff is nonsense.