The Long Tail is a book I recommend all my clients to read. It shows the demand for keywords related to batteries, from frequently searched terms at the top to low-volume queries at the bottom. The strategy of long tail marketing can be great if it is used in the right way. The authors also look toward the future to discuss second-order, amplified effects of Long Tail, including the growth of markets serving smaller niches. Thus, the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[16]. as examples of businesses applying this strategy. Because online video rental provider (such as Amazon.com or Netflix) stocks movies in centralized warehouses, its storage costs are far lower and its distribution costs are the same for a popular or unpopular movie. Bynjolfsson, Erik; Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, 2010. Anderson compared Long Tail to the blockbuster or hit-driven business models of media and retail companies. The book was listed in The New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers list. Hardcover $17.99 $ 17. [1] The term is often used loosely, with no definition or arbitrary definition, but precise definitions are possible. Wiley, 1995. Anderson, Chris (December 13, 2004)"The Long Tail" issue 10.01. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2011. The distribution could involve popularities, random numbers of occurrences of events with various probabilities, etc. [37] On his blog, Chris Anderson responded to the study, praising Elberse and the academic rigor with which she explores the issue but drawing a distinction between their respective interpretations of where the "head" and "tail" begin. Please try again. "[36] Thus, the advent of services such as television on demand, pay-per-view and even premium cable subscription services such as HBO and Showtime open up the opportunity for niche content to reach the right audiences, in an otherwise mass medium. He was the king of the entertainment and business jungle. Look it up now! However, ten years later a book titled Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer was published and Touching the Void began to sell again. It sent forward ceaseless waves of ideas, products and services that everyone purchased and used. 99. The difference in the sales distribution is highly significant, even after controlling for consumer differences. Kiva.org is an organization that provides micro credits to people worldwide, by using intermediaries called small microfinance organizations (S.M.O. Everything of consequence was produced and delivered by the Manx Cat. Vermont’s Long Trail follows the main ridge of the Green Mountains from the Massachusetts-Vermont line to the Canadian border. The competitive threat from these niche sites is reduced by the cost of establishing and maintaining them and the effort required for readers to track multiple small web sites. Chris Anderson argues that while quantities such as human height or IQ follow a normal distribution, in scale-free networks with preferential attachments, power law distributions are created, i.e. In his Wired article, Chris Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. Instead of, as Anderson likes to put it "hit culture" we better get used to "niche culture". The big website covers more variety while the small website has only a few niches to choose from. A guidebook to the new millenium internet. Users want products that are customized to their needs. The entire world hung on his every word, as they watched their Magic Picture Tubes and reacted to every twitch of his tiny, yet magical tail. These encourage the diversification of products. The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! It created the hit records, movies and books. [citation needed], The banking business has used internet technology to reach an increasing number of customers. Call it the Silver Series and charge half the price. I found this something like a scrapbook of impressions, facts and notes taken on a journey of discovery with Anderson as a sort of Lewis and Clark of the post 2000 internet world. You already know the internet has changed the way the world works, plays, learns and shares. In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has successfully followed this business model. The Long Tail of the SolarWinds Breach By Dennis Fisher. Not all recommender systems are equal, however, when it comes to expanding the long tail. In those cases the infrequent, low-amplitude (or low-revenue) events – the long tail, represented here by the portion of the curve to the right of the 20th percentile – can become the largest area under the line. A Wharton study details this phenomenon along with several ideas that may promote the long tail and greater diversity.[21]. .orange-text-color {font-weight:bold; color: #FE971E;}View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look. An interview with Benoît Mandelbrot", "Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers", "The Longer Tail: The Changing Shape of Amazon’s Sales Distribution Curve", "Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs on the Concentration of Product Sales", "Shelf space strategy in long tail markets", "Vision and Mission Statement for Building Inclusive Financial Sectors", "Excellent HBR piece challenging the Long Tail", "Rethinking the Long Tail Theory: How to Define 'Hits' and 'Niches, "More Long Tail debate: mobile music no, search yes", "Long Tail theory contradicted as study reveals 10m digital music tracks unsold", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Long_tail&oldid=991012550, All articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases, Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from May 2013, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2013, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2011, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2011, Articles that may contain original research from May 2015, All articles that may contain original research, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2013, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Work performed by individuals in commons-like, non-market networks, described in the work of, This page was last edited on 27 November 2020, at 20:16. Though nicely captured, it's an obvious trend. The opportunities that arise because of the long tail greatly affect society's cultures because suppliers have unlimited capabilities due to infinite storage and demands that were unable to be met prior to the long tail are realized. The internet can still sell physical goods, but at an unlimited selection and with reviews and recommendations. 5.0 out of 5 stars 1. The Pursuit of Wow! Given the diminishing cost of communication and information sharing (by analogy to the low cost of storage and distribution, in the case of e-tailers), long-tailed user driven innovation will gain importance for businesses. A recent study conducted by Wenqi Zhou and Wenjing Duan[22] further points out that the demand side factor (online user reviews) and the supply side factor (product variety) interplay to influence the long tail formation of user choices. This means that a long tail distribution includes many values that are far away from the mean value. The "crowds" of customers, users and small companies that inhabit the long-tail distribution can perform collaborative and assignment work. A team at Wharton did some Long Tail analysis on the Netflix ratings data the company released for its Netflix Prize. At the beginning it seemed to me like nobody could argue with the main idea behind the book. Comm. A small number of very popular products still dominates the demand. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Looked at from the producers' side, the long tail has made possible a flowering of creativity across all fields of human endeavour. We identify a total of 97 SMGs, including 70 not previously implicated in prostate cancer, such as the ubiquitin ligase CUL3 and the transcription factor SPEN. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. Some of the most successful Internet businesses have used the long tail as part of their business strategy. Even browsing through Amazon and looking for a product within any given category it feels obvious that with the internet entering every stage of production, distribution and consumption we are destined to be faced with ever growing choice of products. Long tail is a phrase popularized by Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired Magazine, in 2004. Before goods can be put on shelves, they have to be made, and so Anderson identifies the first force of the Long Tail as "democratizing the tools of production. The intersection of viral marketing, online communities and new technologies that operate within the long tail of consumers and business is described in the novel by William Gibson, Pattern Recognition. Often presented as a phenomenon of interest primarily to mass market retailers and web-based businesses, the long tail also has implications for the producers of content, especially those whose products could not – for economic reasons – find a place in pre-Internet information distribution channels controlled by book publishers, record companies, movie studios, and television networks. FREE Shipping on orders over $25 shipped by Amazon. The long-tail distribution applies at a given point in time, but over time the relative popularity of the sales of the individual products will change. For example, a small website that focuses on niches of content can be threatened by a larger website which has a variety of information (such as Yahoo) Web content. The Long Tail “Long Tail Business Models are about selling less of more by focussing on offering a large amount of niche products, while each item sells relatively infrequently.” Aggregate sales of niche products can be as profitable as the traditional sales model, where a small amount of bestsellers account for most revenues. Built between 1910 and 1930, it was the vision of James P. Taylor and later became the inspiration for the Appalachian Trail. The Long Tail - My Coronavirus Recovery Sophie Wilson is one of the thousands of people in the UK with ‘Long Covid’. where I ran into a friend and well-known industry analyst, Wood Mackenzie’s Michelle Davis. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. Anderson has explained the term as a reference to the tail of a demand curve. Appl. In statistics, the term long-tailed distribution has a narrow technical meaning, and is a subtype of heavy-tailed distribution. Long Tail business models benefit from low The distribution could involve popularities, random numbers of occurrences of events with various probabilities, etc. [citation needed] One example of this is YouTube, where thousands of diverse videos – whose content, production value or lack of popularity make them inappropriate for traditional television – are easily accessible to a wide range of viewers. to envision a time in which game-based training devices or simulations will be available for thousands of different job descriptions. because some nodes are more connected than others (like Malcolm Gladwell’s “mavens” in The Tipping Point).[10][11]. Goodbye Pareto principle, welcome the new distribution. By contrast, the long tails in the frequency-rank plots highlighted by Anderson and Shirky would rather correspond to short tails in the associated probability distributions, and therefore illustrate an opposite phenomenon compared to the Gutenberg–Richter and the Zipf's laws. The book was initially published on July 11, 2006, by Hyperion. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches. The specific cutoff of what part of a distribution is the "long tail" is often arbitrary, but in some cases may be specified objectively; see segmentation of rank-size distributions. […] Consumers' reliance on online user reviews to choose products is significantly influenced by the quantity of products available. In support of their findings, Wenqi Zhou and Wenjing Duan not only find a longer tail but also a fatter tail by an in-depth analysis on consumer software downloading pattern in their paper "Online user reviews, product variety, and the long tail"[1]. A methodology that helps here is long-tail analysis, an approach that looks for very weak signals from attackers who are technologically savvy enough to … [38] Similar results were published by Serguei Netessine and Tom F. Tan, who suggest that head and tail should be defined by percentages rather than absolute numbers. The long tail is a statistical pattern of distribution that occurs when a larger share of occurrences occur farther away from the centre or head of distribution. He highlighted that, when a store has a large distribution channel, it can market low demand products, which can collectively make up market share. Some relevant forms of these new production models are: The demand-side factors that lead to the long tail can be amplified by the "networks of products" which are created by hyperlinked recommendations across products. Companies can make use of a series of tools, such as interactive and internet based technologies, to give their users a voice and to enable them to do innovation work that is useful to the company. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2012. The term is often used loosely, with no definition or arbitrary definition, but precise definitions are possible. The Long Tail philosophy presumes that our culture and financial system is gradually moving away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (typical products and marketplaces) at the head of the demand curve and to a large number of niches in the tail. certain collaborative filters) can exhibit a bias toward popular products, creating positive feedback, and actually reduce the long tail. Sometimes an intermediate category is also included, variously called the body, belly, torso, or middle. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the "long tail")—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the "head"). Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. This created a niche market for those who enjoy books about mountain climbing even though it is not considered a popular genre supporting the long tail theory. They are willing to tell the manufacturer what they really want and how it should work. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. An 80/20 rule fits the distribution of product sales in the catalog channel quite well, but in the Internet channel, this rule needs to be modified to a 72/28 rule in order to fit the distribution of product sales in that channel. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 29, 2017, Excellent, excellent book that describes (amongst much else) how and why Amazon is such a success, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 31, 2013. He had everything, and everyone wanted what he had. For example, new items constantly enter most fashion markets. Therefore, in these latter cases "tails" correspond to large-intensity events such as large earthquakes and most popular words, who dominate the distributions. It is important to understand why some distributions are normal vs. long tail (power) distributions. We had caught up earlier in the week to chat about the commercial and industrial (C&I) solar sector, in which my firm specializes and which she researches regularly. .orange-text-color {color: #FE971E;} Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration. Steps 1 Pull about 20 inches (50.8 cm) from the ball of yarn. When so many people are wasting countless millions on ineffective marketing the Long Tail is the doorway to a method of marketing products or services that is absolutely free to impplement. For the thousands of SolarWinds customers who may have installed a trojaned update planted by attackers earlier this year, the next few days and weeks will be tense and stressful as the incident response teams work to determine what, if any, damage has been done. There may be an optimal inventory size, given the balance between sales and the cost of keeping up with the turnover. The key supply-side factor that determines whether a sales distribution has a long tail is the cost of inventory storage and distribution. [39], Also in 2008, a sales analysis of an unnamed UK digital music service by economist Will Page and high-tech entrepreneur Andrew Bud found that sales exhibited a log-normal distribution rather than a power law; they reported that 80% of the music tracks available sold no copies at all over a one-year period. 's)to distribute crowd sourced donations made by Kiva.org lenders. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This suggests that a variation of one mechanism (internet access) or relationship (the cost of storage) can significantly shift the frequency of occurrence of certain events in the distribution. .orange-text-color {font-weight:bold; color: #FE971E;}Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more. Although I don’t agree with many of the conclusions in their paper (like some other academics, they got confused over definitions of “head” and “tail” and fell into the common trap of doing percentage analysis in an absolute numbers world), the data was interesting. A study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith[17] finds that the long tail has grown longer over time, with niche books accounting for a larger share of total sales. [a] Note that there is no sense of the "long tail" of a distribution, but only the property of a distribution being long-tailed. Similarly, mass-market distributors like Blockbuster may be threatened by distributors like LoveFilm, which supply the titles that Blockbuster doesn't offer because they are not already very popular. On the demand side, tools such as search engines, recommendation software, and sampling tools are allowing customers to find products outside their geographic area. by Lark Pien | Jul 8, 2014. Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2011. Examples of behaviors that exhibit long-tailed distribution are the occurrence of certain words in a given language, the income distribution of a business or the intensity of earthquakes (see: Gutenberg–Richter law). The tail becomes bigger and longer in new markets (depicted in red). These factors have been transformed by easy and cheap web site software and the spread of RSS. What does the long tail expression mean? In other words, whereas traditional retailers have focused on the area to the left of the chart, online bookstores derive more sales from the area to the right. A little while back, I was at an industry happy hour (hey, remember those?) This fact has given rise to a keen scientific and social interest in such distributions, and the relationships that create them. Long Tail. Their analyses suggested that by 2008, niche books accounted for 36.7% of Amazon's sales while the consumer surplus generated by niche books has increased at least fivefold from 2000 to 2008. Before a long tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. Bessis, Jöel "Risk Management in Banking". The work of Benoît Mandelbrot in the 1950s and later has led to him being referred to as "the father of long tails".[8]. Beautiful girls waited on him hand and foot, hoping for an opportunity to please him. Why Target Long Tail Keywords? At the end of the long tail, the conventional profit-making business model ceases to exist; instead, people tend to come up with products for varied reasons like expression rather than monetary benefit. With the digital and hybrid retailers there is no longer a perimeter on market demands. We find that the incidence of significantly mutated genes (SMGs) follows a long-tail distribution, with many genes mutated in less than 3% of cases. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. The demand for all products decreases, but the decrease for the hits is more pronounced, indicating the demand shifting from the hits to the niches over time. Definitions by the largest Idiom Dictionary. In a 2006 working paper titled "Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail",[18] Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Duncan Simester found that, by greatly lowering search costs, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular could substantially increase the collective share of hard-to-find products, thereby creating a longer tail in the distribution of sales. On the supply side, the authors point out how e-tailers' expanded, centralized warehousing allows for more offerings, thus making it possible for them to cater to more varied tastes.[20]. The New York Times bestseller that introduced the business world to a future that s already here -- now in paperback with a new chapter about Long Tail Marketing and a new epilogue. He was the King of the Economic Jungle. Use of the phrase the long tail in business as "the notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market" of consumers was first coined by Chris Anderson. Every Person's Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, Edge Strategy: A New Mindset for Profitable Growth, Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials), The Global Code: How a New Culture of Universal Values Is Reshaping Business and Marketing, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (Expanded Edition), The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World. Anderson realized that this was due to Amazon's recommendations. McDonald, Scott. Those economics of storage and distribution then enable the advantageous use of the long tail: for example, Netflix finds that in aggregate, "unpopular" movies are rented more than popular movies. Frequency distributions with long tails have been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The drive to build a market and obtain revenue from the consumer demographic of the long tail has led businesses to implement a series of long-tail marketing techniques, most of them based on extensive use of internet technologies. Res. They then quantified the potential value of the long tail to consumers. In addition, the increase in product variety reduces the impact of user reviews on popular products more than it does on niche products. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Their voices, sometimes very sweet, went unnoticed. Etymology. In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. For example, a traditional movie rental store has limited shelf space, which it pays for in the form of building overhead; to maximize its profits, it must stock only the most popular movies to ensure that no shelf space is wasted. We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Get it as soon as Tue, Jan 12. He drank martinis for lunch. The above-mentioned points are quite helpful in offering you a great platform so that you can make use of the strategy in the best way and get exposure and promote your products and get high sales profit from it. It also is a business model that fills an important developmental role in an economy.[33]. .orange-text-color {font-weight:bold; color: #FE971E;}Ask Alexa to read your book with Audible integration or text-to-speech. The word "jaeger" is derived from the German word Jäger, meaning "hunter". Anderson discusses three themes that are leading to a longer tail in business — democratization of production, democratization of distribution and … They found that a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales come from obscure books that were not available in brick-and-mortar stores. In his Wired article Anderson opens with an anecdote about creating a niche market for books on Amazon. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. "The Long Tail" is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche.