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Harvard Study Questions "Long Tail" Theory
mjasay writes "Remember 'the long tail?' That was the idea that there was gobs of money to be made in the more obscure tastes of any given market, enabled by the web. In recent research highlighted in the Harvard Business Review, however, the long tail theory comes under withering criticism. Not only is a hits-based business more profitable for vendors according to the new research, but the research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits, rather than the tail. In short, the researchers find that 'the tail is long and flat, and therefore that content providers will find it hard to profit much from it.'" Long Tail advocate Chris Anderson defends his theory, and it seems that most of the debate centers around how you define "head" and "tail."
Didn't we figure this out about 7 years ago when the web bubble burst?
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
But then try to explain porn websites. There is a lot of tail to be hit there.
it seems that most of the debate centers around how you define "head" and "tail"."
I'd help but I'd need to link to some pages that I shouldn't browse at work...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... who would have thought?
e like everywhere
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I call bullshit on this. You mean to tell me that Amazon.com and iTunes Store would be more successful if they only carried the most popular 1% of their stock? How about *ANY* bookstore, not even just the online ones.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
...it seems that most of the debate centers around how you define "head" and "tail".
Bill? Bill Clinton? Is that you?
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Seems reasonable to me. I get all my CDs either from CDBaby or artists own sites, or from Amazon. It's been at least a decade since I set foot in a "record store" with bongs under the counter and some pompous indie snob behind it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Correct me if I am wrong, but the basic gist I got was that the 'long tail' theory states there is a lot of money to be made in 'niche' or 'subculture' elements, and the critics say this is wrong. I can wholeheartedly disagree. It's not easy to extract the profit from niche markets, and the long tail probably doesn't add up to the 'head' so to speak, in most cases, but there is certainly a lot of money to be made.
Take TV for instance. Your 'Heads' there may be ABC, CBS, NBC, and you could call things like The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, Comedy Central, Sci-Fi Network, etc the 'tail', as I understand it. And there is quite the potential for the 'tails', in this instance, to make even more than the 'heads'.
This is just as far as I understand it, mind you.
I know I "derive more enjoyment" from my definitions of "head" and "tail".
stuff |
When you see anything being hyped on the cover of "Wired" magazine as the 'next big thing,' chances are it's a complete load of crap.
Pope's corallary to Sturgeon's Law. :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
OK, so how about no copyright or patent protection for stuff in the tail then, since there is no money to be made there right. Well, you can have a copyright there is you use a Free Copyleft license.
Any howls about all the money that would be lost yet?
How about the RIAA and MPAA cannot bring suits based on sharing from the tail?
Any howls yet?
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Not only is a hits-based business more profitable for vendors according to the new research, but the research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits, rather than the tail.
This new research, which according to Chris Anderson was "[b]ased on Rhapsody music data and DVD rental data from an Australian Netflix clone called Quickflix" can hardly be called representative, IMO.
I would suggest that the nature of the "long tail" itself makes any accurate (ie. statistics-based) research on this extremely difficult, if not impossible. In other words, to make a true comparison one would have to research an equal volume in the "long tail," meaning thousands of times more entities researched to compare the same number of transactions.
Even if she is basing conclusions on the tastes or preferences of the purchases/selections in the two companies researched, that could simply mean that for those "niche" preferences people are going elsewhere - e.g. to "niche" entities.
http://clightnirish.wordpress.com/
"Internet Bubble Economic Theory found Fallacious, News at 11:00"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Porn. People do pay much higher sums for rather obscure or taboo things.
The problem with the "long tail" is that companies assumed it scaled. By definition it will only apply to a fringe. There is only space in such fringe areas for one or two dominant players; these players may make gobs of cash, but only in relation to their market size.
Of course large vendors aren't going to find it profitable to appeal to multiple fringe markets. The level of effort involved to support each individual small market is high and then combined with a number of markets means you end up burning through more manpower per dollar than a smaller dedicated company. It's the same problem of having too many products/SKUs/whatever, see DEC/Apple pre Jobs for an example of failing this way.
--- I do not moderate.
exists as the head, any song, any movie, any information, it was all 'new and shiny' to someone somewhere at some point. if profitability is based solely on items deep in the tail, you'd be right, there wouldn't be much profit in it. given the the standard business model of mixed content including head and tail items, then the cost of business including long tail items is still near zero, and the profitability of those items is likely more than any 'head' related material that the original content creator is seeking maximum licensing revenue for.
They'd have fewer sales, of course. But the fewer sales would be a tiny portion of the sales of their most popular items.
But a company that ignores the most popular items will have a very difficult time making a profit. That's the "tail" portion. Which was claimed to ... eventually ... be MORE profitable than the most popular items.
most of the debate centers around how you define "head" and "tail"
*ahem*
That's what SHE said!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Mostly because the German word for "tail" is also used for the male anatomy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
why are they concentrating on how *profitable* the long tail is?
As far as I see it, the long tail isn't about PROFIT, but about how much society wants the entertainment.
How many REALLY old songs would you like to hear again? Well, given that each year older adds another pile of songs, the profit in EACH TITLE is spread thinner and thinner. Because what I'd like to hear again from the 70's isn't what YOU'D like to hear from the 70's.
The long tail is showing that copyright lengths ARE damaging society. And it not being profitable enough to make a business on shows that there is NO BUSINESS LOSS in shortening copyright to a time where works are still wanted.
Really, copyright now is more about the accountants' abject fear that someone else is making money and not them.
Shit, if you're not SELLING a good, why not let someone else do it, or even just release it for free and forget about it? Because in that case, there's no money for you to make. That you don't want to spend the effort to MAKE the money in the first place seems irrelevant to your accounting brain.
So I don't understand the ribbing. It's arguing that it isn't profitable when that's not what the long tail is about. It's about demand continuing BEYOND the profitable age of entertainment goods.
I'm selling buggy whips and chastity belts. I'm making a fortune! God, I sell one or two a decade!
The long tail theory is completely sound. The problem is that "search" fails.
As anyone who has ever tried to promote something on the web knows, it's an uphill struggle. There's a massive inertia curve -- especially if you have a niche subject. If you can't go to a high traffic site and find potential customers, or use the synergy of a similar site, then you're going to have to spend a massive amount of money promoting your site using old World media -- newspaper ads, flyers, word of mouth etc.
Adsense isn't worth the money unless you are a marketing expert and are prepared to lose money finding the right combination. And as much as Google improved search in 1997, they've not improved it ever since. In fact they've killed the competition stone dead. There's still room for MASSIVE improvement in search. Google seriously needs real competition.
Black hat SEO link farms dominate all sorts of obscure search terms, so how do you compete with that?
If search was better, if there is a way for a niche audience to get together, then the long tail model works just fine.
So they're "hard-coding" blog and website here into the agreement. Looks like a beta-agreement.
More seriously, such publisher-by-publisher agreements are just what copyright laws are designed to avoid.
Maybe this is a sign to just throw out copyright laws, and have rights negotiated on a work-by-work basis.
On the other hand, I feel if someone (here Harvard) invokes copyright, they should not be allowed to add their own rules when they conflict with or limit fair-use.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
If they sell 100 titles and 10 of them constitute 90% of revenue, then if they ONLY sell those items, they will make 90% of the money they made when they sold all 100.
Now if what they are on about is that 90 of the titles make no profit because it's wiped out by the need of inventory control, then why is it P2P is counted to be taking trillions worldwide from the systems (you'd presume 90% of this would be the non-profitable works)? Surely only 10% of the titles are commercially worth anything, so only 10% of the tracks should be sued for.
Yes?
For a brick and mortar store, concentrating on the sure hits makes a lot of sense. Funny story, my dad had to pick up a new alternator for a 30-year old truck. The local parts store had one in stock. The parts man looks the box over and says "Yep, had this one on the shelf for about 18 years." That's a bit longer on turnover than most businesses would shoot for. But when you're talking about cheap warehouses in the bad part of town doing all of their selling and shipping online... this whole argument could probably be solved with access to Netflix's database and a few queries. My hypothesis:
1. A huge percentage (35%?) of their business will be new releases.
2. The next biggest percentage would fall into the "perennial classics" category, i.e. the kind of movies that aren't new releases that a Blockbuster would have, movies that do a steady, dependable business.
3. Everything else would fall into the "obscure shit" category, the stuff that Blockbuster does not carry because it's too infrequently rented.
I will wager that the revenue from #3 more than pays for itself AND serves as a draw for customers who rent across all three categories. Joe Customer chose Netflix because they carry obscure Asian chop-chop flicks but will also rent Cloverfield from them since hey, he has an account.
As another example, say I want to pick up some obscure, out of print book. I hit Amazon first out of force of habit. Good news, they have it. That makes it all the more likely for me to type in Amazon when I want to buy the next top-seller I saw on the Daily Show. If Amazon didn't have the obscure books I want, I might go to some other site by default, and then they'll be getting all of my New York Times Bestseller business.
If we're talking about a brick and mortar store, the carrying cost of the truly obscure could well be too high to justify itself. With online stores, there's no excuse not to carry the obscure.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
most of the debate centers around how you define "head" and "tail"." Actually it depends upon how you define profit. If you are using content as part of a larger marketing strategy, then the long tail makes sense. The content gives you an online identity.
In the "blockbuster" model you don't concentrate on "the top 10000" or even "the top 1000", you push very very few products... a dozen at most (the example they use of book publishing... they only pushed *two* blockbuster titles at a time).
The article is turning that over, and interpreting "the long tail" as being only the "anti blockbusters", the products selling a few copies a year. But once you have the product in your digital inventory you're paying virtually nothing to keep it alive, so instead of trying to figure out what the top forty next month is going to be so you can stock your stores with it, and shoveling albums out into the cold after six months on the shelves, you *can* keep it all available.
It's not a matter of "this end vs that end", it's "you don't need to worry about the ends".
Long Tail advocate Chris Anderson defends his theory...
You mean, this Chris Anderson? The "science is now useless because we have teh cloudz" guy? Yeah, after that gem of scientific insight, lemme rush right over and see what he's prattling on about in the world of finance...
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
I think a system where companies are paid on a per-copy basis for things that cost nothing to copy is seriously flawed.
1. It doesn't reflect physical reality, so it generates tremendous incentives for people to make their own copies, despite the laws.
2. #1 makes these companies inordinately vulnerable to copying and black markets, so it causes them to push for bad legislation (e.g. DMCA).
3. #1 and #2 erode people's confidence in the legal system.
4. The incentive to aim for "hits" is magnified greatly. This results in everything being aimed at the lowest common denominator of public taste (OK, not actually "everything", but anything else is written off as the province of "fanatics" clamoring for "obscure products" - see TFA).
I see this as a plague, and the answer is to completely legalize copying and stop calling it "piracy". Then the recording and movie industries will stop making millions pushing garbage to the masses, and those folks might actually have to get real jobs doing work that actually contributes to society.
I dunno about that. Seems to me that targeting multiple fringe markets is a hedge against its inherent risk, while reducing your cost basis (lots of the infrastructure will be common). The trick is making sure you don't try to scale past what you can sell.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The success of the long tail theory completely depends on the transient nature or durability of the product mix.
Amazon makes the long tail work because Amazon is still a big fat book store (and sells other things): books have a shelf life measured in years. Books do not decay, they do not fall out of fashion, they do not get replaced by next year's model (mostly). As such, Amazon can build up a long tail of obscure books and build a brand of a bookstore where you can find anything.
Zappos is trying this with shoes. The problem here is that Shoes fall out of fashion, so I am not sure that works. I used to work for a company that sold outdoor gear-- it kinda worked as some things were durable, but even then most equipment (and especially apparel) have a shelf-life of one season (one year).
Music may work-- someone's always searching for some Captain Beefheart or TSOL-- but certainly the biggest profit (because production costs are so low for massed produced copies) are in the big-hit ranges.
It all depends on the seasonal and long-term durability of the product.
davejenkins.com |
Long tail in porn.....
are we talking Furries here?
<Ducks>
Well, here's the root of Chris Anderson's logic:
"The content is compelling. It notes that we've entered the Age of the Petabyte, "where one can collect intense amounts of data that is paradigm agnostic. It goes on to add a comment from the head of Google's R&D, that we need an "update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them." Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?"
Or as the rest of Slashdot interpreted it: WTF?
I can't imagine why an idea of his wouldn't be totally logically consistent and compelling.
create a file with each line contains a letter a to c.
:)
a
b
c
and cat file | tail -1 = c
cat file | head -1 = a
Thank GNU people for clearing that out
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
That is the best defense of the long tail theory I have ever heard
If it's dead, you killed it.
. . . that [unimaginative] also derive more enjoyment from the hits . . .
If your enjoyment is constituted by conformity, the culture of mass-production works a treat, don't it? Lost in the the econometry is the adaptability of human desire.
illegitimii non ingravare
But then try to explain porn websites. There is a lot of tail to be hit there.
And lots of head too...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Yah, but you have to admit that the stuff involving long tails is very much a niche product.
There is a debate about how you define head and tail?
"Research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits..."
Really? More people like popular things than unpopular things? Or, in other words, more people like things which more people like?
Wonders never cease.
Porn. People do pay much higher sums for rather obscure or taboo things.
Are we talking porn, or prostitutes? I just can't see paying much, let alone much more for porn. It is mostly not to my tastes, but usually "good enough" to get the job done. Kinda like politicians, except the porn actually helps to get the job done, unlike politicians.
Chris Anderson is an idiot, but he only popularized long tail theory, not developed it. Shouldn't hold a twit supporter against a good idea.
Of course the top 10% brings vastly more revenue than the bottom 90%. Nobody disputes that, and that's NOT what the long tail theory claims. The theory is that adding this extra 90% (which in now very cheap because of virtual storage), you tap a vast, unexplored market.
I also agree that, in addition to the direct sales of the bottom 90% (or even 99%), there are important network effects: some people come to the site precisely because they know it's one of the most comprehensive stores available.
As Anderson notes, the defintion of "head" and "tail" are important; Anderson was initially basing his information off of the result of switching away from retail space. If less than 1% of the items of a market can make it into the inventory of a Wal-Mart, then even if the top 1% is 32% of sales, the Long Tail is pretty powerful.
Around the "research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits, rather than the tail." From the article -
Popularity and quality are not completely divorced from one another; I'd expect the more popular titles to better, just not nearly to the same extent as their sales would indicate.
I'd be interested in "in-genre vs out-of-genre" ratings for the heavy users as well; while the article indicates that heavy users rate popular titles disproportionately highly, this may be a result of the heavy users (who consume a lot of obscure stuff) working primarily within their genre as opposed to across genres. If you like action movies more than romantic comedies, you're more likely to give the action movie the higher rating if you both of them and they're of equal quality. I think it's likely (though not certain) that heavier consumers stick more to their genre/tastes even among the popular items, which would result in them having a disproportionately high rating for popular stuff compared to lighter consumers. (The article does note the disparity is true for products as a whole - heavier/obscure consumers are more likely to stick to a single genre - but doesn't run the comparison among the popular subset of their tastes).
As for the business suggestions, some of them seem ok, but others -
There's a difference between knowing something isn't actually any good and the amount you'd pay for it, especially for obscure products. Consumer ratings are not directly analogous to the price premium someone would willingly pay for something, and not simply in the people buying things because they suck market; things like completionism and other impulses that aren't connected to a work's quality will lead to obscure works being worth high price premiums regardless of quality.
While you shouldn't radically alter things, this is ignoring the issue of what the "head" is in the first place. If the "head" of an online store is bigger than the entirely inventory of a typical Wal-Mart, there's going to be a shift in marketing tactics.
Much of TFA focuses on things like "20% of your catalog generates 80% of your revenue, so the 20% is more profitable and should be focused on.
But that kinda sidestepps the point. If I went to my boss and said 'Hey, I have a method where we can get 10-30% more revenue with no significant additional infrastructure outside content space' you better believe they would jump on the idea.
Conversly if I said 'hey, I can cut a small percent of our operating costs by reducing our content selection but it will cost us around 20% of our revenue' I would be tarred and feathered.
Well, I really just wanted to make fun of /. summaries that cast this guy as "somebody worth listening to" in two fields of knowledge in the same week, but yeah, I'll try not to hold his support against the idea.
I'll probably still hold the Harvard researchers' criticisms against the idea, though. ;)
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Anita Elberse: Mr. Anderson... you disappoint me.
Chris Anderson: You can't scare me with this Gestapo crap. I know my rights. I want my phone call.
Anita Elberse: Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a phone call... if you're unable to speak?
The article is basically attacking a misconception about the Long Tail. It's a misconception that goes all the way back to Chris Anderson's book.
It is possible to get rich from the Long Tail. Amazon does it. ITunes Music Store does it.
What's lacking in the book is pointing out that the *content creators* don't get rich. The Net means you can now eke out a tiny amount of cash by delivering your content to people. And in aggregate, that's a lot of money. But for each individual artist, it's not much.
It doesn't mean the end of blockbusters, because people LIKE blockbusters. It means that you have more alternatives, so you can see something else, but in general, you won't. Most people like what most people like. Duh. The additional cash that goes to the "long tail" artists does make them a bit less profitable, but there's still plenty of profit in them.
So the Long Tail doesn't mean that your rock band is going to be as rich as Van Halen. It means that you can make a few hundred bucks, but it's not going to make you a living, much less a superstar.
Anderson completely missed this fact. He was all rah-rah about what it meant for consumers (who have more options) and big retailers (who make big money on small margins) but paid zero attention to the artists, who get tiny wins but not big wins.
No Longcat jokes in here? Come on!
Yeah, poor summary there. ^_^
Eh, the thing with Harvard researchers though is they can be very narrow viewed in their targets. They often focus a lot on big players and methods that work well for big companies so the research tends to be slanted that way. While they have some really useful things to say they have to be taken with a grain of salt if you are aiming for small under-served markets or not planning to get huge.
A typical concept, which actually relates here, would be saying that nitches are not worth serving because the mass market is so much bigger and the margins are higher, therefor you should only serve the mass market. Nitch markets have caps on them, mass markets generally do not. The reasoning works really well if you want to grow large and compete dirrectly with the other biggies, but fails flat if you are trying to go into a nitch with little or no existing competition.
A simplier way to put my point... their pieces tends to make sense on a macro scale,... but apply poorly to little 'mom and pop' companies.
why are they concentrating on how *profitable* the long tail is? As far as I see it, the long tail isn't about PROFIT, but about how much society wants the entertainment.
If not by profit, how would you judge what socity wants? I have been to many state sponsored cultural events [opera, expermintal dance] which I have found beautiful. They are also half empty. A good example of the long tail and poorly allocated resources. Which is why I am in favor of strong [but short] copyrights. Profit is the best [but not perfect] way of socity showing what they want- being pop bland or nich indi.
I can't really make head or tail of this theory.
The Long Now Foundation
Redbox is a vending-machine movie rental system. I walk into the Wal-Mart a mile from my house, and there's this big, well, red box sitting there. It operates on the opposite of the "long tail": it only has a couple dozen of the very latest movies, has many (but not infinite) copies of each, costs $1 per night (just swipe your credit card), keep 'em as long as you want (after a month, just keep it - for $29 you've already paid for it), rental & return is rediculously simple with none of the "video store" hassle.
Instead of having everything anyone might be looking for (the "long tail" model), it has a few things that most people will probably want (say, the "dirt cheap blockbuster" model). Turnover of content is very high, so there is most likely something sufficiently interesting (for a buck a night, that's a lot) there at any time. Content range is very narrow, so customers can browse very quickly; covers of most movies available are shown on the front of the vending machine, so one can review what's available in just a few seconds (a thourough list is available by touchscreen) even while someone else is actually using the machine. And with rentals being just a buck a night, getting something or keeping something a few days is trivially cheap.
It complements Netflix/Amazon thus: instead of getting exactly what I want in a few days, I get something satisfactory right now. My "long tail" providers can find anything I specifically want within a few days, but if I simply want a couple hours' entertainment now I can get something suitable, dirt cheap, in a few minutes. And when I take a rental back, it's just too easy to pick up another. It also fills the gap between "long tail" services and TV's "you'll watch what we want when we want" model.
That the box is located at the entrance to a store which thousands of people frequent with great regularity, rather than being a special trip, completes the winning business model.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Some long tails don't even fit in any niche I've ever seen.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Nobody NEEDS (or SHOULD) be selling these struggling artists songs because they aren't profitable to be bothering about.
Which means that they aren't going to get any money anyway.
At least not if these accountants are listened to.
PS: EITHER should fall into the tail. In, say five years, will ANYONE care about buying *either*? No. But they re still impossible for me to copy and sell (or just distribute) because copyright for these songs released today will not become available until AT LEAST 2103. I'll probably have been dead thirty years and my interest will have waned somewhat by then...
"Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 1 hour 16 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Do you think that /. change the posting design so you couldn't give them the shit they so richly deserve for their piece-of-shit-coding? If the fucker knows it's been 62 minutes, why is it not believing itself? Or is it a 90 minute interval?
Fucking green poo babyshit coding. Reason why I won't get an account: why spend money to get better posting when I have to wait 90 minutes between them...
Up from a starting point of 20 minutes. Will I see 100?
Having now gone through the entire piece, I'm changing my take from skeptical to balanced. The research does not actually go against "Long Tail" theory at all (despite the researching saying it does, which is really confusing).
The end argument of the research basicly says that heavy customers do in fact dip into tail markets and having a good obscure selection can be really good for business but it is important to keep a good eye on cost/return on such content. Much of this is actually in the advertising/marketing space and is really talking about how you PROMOTE your material rather then what you carry... so promote the popular things that will draw people in then have a good selection of obscure things to satisfy the wide requirements of heavy customers.
So it almost reads like a 'long tail has some good business logic behind it but chris is an overenthusasitic idiot who simplifies things and abanonds balance and cost/benifit anaysis'
And lots of curves too...
"In 2006 just 20% of Grand Centralâ(TM)s titles accounted for roughly 80% of its sales and an even larger share of its profits."
Impressive, years of hard work and focused marketing to make the pareto principle work.
I don't know about that... there's a heck of a lot of furries out there. *shudder*
But how can we define each? Someone call Harvard, important research is afoot!
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
Does the long tail theory then account for the existence on Brazilian Fart Porn?
All girls with tails
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/gallery/0,23816,5032672-17382,00.html
Some video here
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23925458-3102,00.html
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
The media distribution market that is examined is the same one that is under extreme pressure from free alternatives. The Long Tail has more to do with the character of future markets that are not at odds with file sharing realities. Another good example is the online news and analysis market of which this article is a part. Isn't a Harvard Business Publishing product with a very specific focus itself an example of the Long Tail? Who actually reads this stuff? They obviously weren't trying for a blockbuster, just relevance, therefore their own work is entirely in the context of and supporting the Long Tail view of publishing.
But In-N-Out is successful not because they offer limited choices, but because they do such a good job with the choices they offer. I'm not sure if not offering chicken, salads, etc makes their burgers better, but I know they do what they do better.
...except maybe the stock hypists.
My understanding was that the whole concept only became possible with IT and what it can do with both content delivery and supply chain management. Hence it is an interesting case study, not a fun business.
3 search hits on a *good* day on something that could take a year to sell is in no way a big cash cow, and you have to be a Walmart or Amazon to pull off the enormous operations side of it, because the tail must be massive to even work. And even then, the margins are slim.
I'll leave it to my betters to unearth an official article, but the "hits" concept goes after the broadest common baseline, which means that taking artistic risks gets discouraged.
However, "Society" *does* need a content stock to be able to study from and produce Grace C First Attempts without fear of owing more than the national budget of a small country.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Definitely count me in this category.
Serious subjective feelings get involved if you know they carry the large range, and that it's not just This Month's Selections.
I decided to spend a couple thousand on books I know I'll *eventually* want to read, but can't stand the Out Of Print process kicking in because they're headed right for the Long Tail.
Stocking Laterally is a huge part of this. If I go on a rampage, I'll tend to buy multiple titles from an author's spread right then, and no other time. Next Month is too late.
If a store carries all 16 titles of a saga, that's way better for sales than if they randomly found #'s 3,7,12 in their warehouse and stuck them out.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Buy One Get One Purple Spikey Beanie Babies"
Sounds like a 90's sales pitch tag.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The whole long tail idea seems like a trendy "pop" business and marketing book boldly proclaiming the obvious. The only thing that changed was it became more economical to serve what were niche markets. But Henry Ford did it: reaching into the then tail of auto ownership by reaching the common man. That can happen via any innovation that reduces either fixed or variable costs whether it be in resources, production, distribution, marketing, selling, or finance. You can even argue the Fed's loose monetary policy coupled with derivative innovations in CDOs allowed houses to reach into the sub-prime tail. That's radical innovation? Hardly. That's basic economics. The book was unimpressive to anyone who understands business and economics.
..differs for each coin.
It'll be the best research ever. In fact, forget Harvard. And the research!
Easy. A head is the car of the list, the tail is the cdr.
Why is the HBR arguing something that's been settled since the 60s? :)
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
and? profit is profit, stop being so damn greedy.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
No, because if that was true, the tail would have ended earlier.
SOME people want it.
But they may be in a different country or only five of them. The profit you gain selling is wiped out by the cost of postage to Katmandu.
Five people STILL want it, though.
And they can't have it.
But if ONE person in Katmandu has a copy and is allowed to copy, they can supply.
Unfortunately, copyright won't die until the customers are long dead.
...and get your ass handed to you by the regulators when somebody realises you've been inflating your assets to unreasonable values. The upper bound to asset valuations has to have some relation to reality, otherwise the next time you get audited (like when an investor starts digging around your financial reports and finds something fishy) your company will, if it's lucky, suffer a massive readjustment in its asset base. If you're unlucky, you'll get penalised by the appropriate regulatory body. If you've been spending the money people invested thinking your company really was worth $4G on parties and hookers, you could end up joining a few Enron execs in prison.
There may be money to be made in obscurity, but perhaps not with the big store-huge customer base/client-server/web.com business model. If bittorrent/napster/etc aren't allowed to flourish by the groups who own the network, then perhaps they're cutting the long tail. Or perhaps making money isn't the point at all. A system of barter between peer A, peer B, and the middlemen is what's needed.
When the only place where I can reliably find obscure books is Amazon, guess where I will buy the so-called head ?
The tail *may* not be that profitable in itself, but what it does *very* well is bringing home those customers that more often than others look for obscure titles. They are those that will buy on a more frequent basis, who find the one supplier who has it all, ergo shop more there.
One of the leading motto of marketing is that it's way easier to hold a customer than to bring him back when he has left. Holding the tail market will make sure the customer stays with you !!!