You Don’t Want to Be In The Long Tail. Really.
OK, this may seem like I’m behind the eight ball to talk about The Long Tail now. It’s been over two years when I sat down with Chris Anderson to talk about his then new book, The Long Tail
You Don’t Benefit Unless You’re the Store
The Long Tail is a distribution model. The entity that benefits from the Long Tail is the store/publisher/network that sells lots of things.
The basic idea is this: technology makes it efficient to distribute electronic goods in a way that the physical world cannot. For example, there’s only so many books a bookstore can physically display, so there’s a fight for shelfspace. Only the best sellers survive.
Not so on the Internet. It costs the same on the Internet to stock today’s best seller as it does to stock a self published manual with two sales a year. What this means is that the store can sell everything because the incremental cost of each item it stocks is negligible.
If you take all the items a store sells and order them by quantity sold, you’ll get a power curve, the Long Tail, like this:
A physical store can only afford to sell what’s in the “Big Head”, or the left side of the curve. A non-physical store can sell everything. Turns out, if you measure the area under the curve that contains things a physical store can’t sell, you’re measuring 80% of all the revenue generated by a non-physical store, like Amazon.com. In other words, if you can stock everything and it doesn’t cost you much to do so, 20% of your revenue will come from hits and 80% of your revenue will come from the Long Tail.
The Common Error
So, here’s what I’ve heard a number of people–generally smart people–say over the past year. “We’ll make money in the Long Tail,” meaning, we’ll sell our stuff because it’s in the long tail.
Wrong!
If you’re a book publisher or author, or a music publisher or artist, you want to be in the Big Head. You want to sell lots of stuff! You don’t want to be in the Long Tail. That’s for people who only sell 1, 2 or 10 of their books or albums a year. If you can wait 10-20 years to generate revenue, then maybe the Long Tail’s for you.
If you need to make money, being in the Long Tail is not a lucrative business strategy.
There. I said it.
The Long Tail benefits the seller/network/publisher. It does not benefit the individual sellers in the long tail. If you’re an author or a musician, you still want a hit. You still want to be in the Big Head. You still want lots of people to buy your stuff.
So, the next time you’re in a meeting and someone says they’re going to make money in the Long Tail, send ‘em my way to set them straight.
