Long Tail. If you hang around the internet for long enough, this is a phrase you will almost certainly happen upon sooner or later. But what is it?Well, if you're imagining yet another YouTube video involving cats, stop it! Seriously. Because you're probably just the kind of person that keeps forwarding me links of the damned things. I don't care how cute its tiny little fluffy paws are, my inbox is not, nor ever will be the submissions address for You've Been Framed. OK?
Anyway, leaving behind my pet hates, and moving on to the actual topic in hand, The Long Tail happens to be a book by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. The Long Tail of the title is the name he gives to the flat but infinitely long end of the demand curve, in which reside all those niche products that don't sell in huge quantities but thanks to the reach of the internet still find a market. We're talking things like Avant-Death-Metal or Glitchcore tracks on iTunes, CDs by barely known bands on Amazon, and the otherwise inexplicable continued availability of Battlefield Earth as a video download or DVD from almost any online movie rental service you care to mention.
By definition then, the items in the Long Tail are not bestsellers, but you might be surprised to hear that taken as a whole, sales of these products can easily match the total sales of all the bestsellers in a particular market. In other words, there is money at both ends of the demand curve: at the short steep head, and at the infinitely long tail. The book is about how this can be exploited.
For any regular business, this is near impossible. Stocking every item in the tail would be not only prohibitively expensive, but also utterly impractical - imagine HMV trying to stock every CD ever produced in each of its stores, for instance. Now imagine HMV, though - it's when we move into cyberspace that the implications of the Long Tail become clear.
To visit HMV is effectively, to set foot inside each and every one of its stores simultaneously - you can browse the extensive Grime inventory of one of its London branches, alongside Trip-Hop in Bristol, all from your laptop in Hull. No doubt also augmented by a central warehouse, the Long Tail is thus spread across all the stores.
Other online businesses have come up with even more elegant solutions to the problems of storing an infinite number of products. Ebay, for instance, cleverly has all its users store the products it sells - it doesn't even have to worry about posting things. But perhaps even better is the business model deployed by iTunes: namely, selling only products that don't even physically exist. Almost a licence to print money.
So why have record labels, movie studios (who've been down this lucrative road once already with home video), and publishers been so slow to cotton on to the opportunities of the Long Tail? After all, infinite, non-physical inventory - what could be better?
No idea, but perhaps they could learn from the YouTube videos I get sent: where there's a tail, there's always an audience.
- Post Office
Check foreign exchange rates and order your foreign currency and travel money at competitive rates from Post Office®.
