We have had some discussion on long tail earlier, including Lee Gomes’ critique earlier.
Chris Andersen, the original proponent of Long tail, comes back with an explanation and rebuttal in this podacast. His central point — he refers to long tail not as a back loaded distribution of goods (with respect to sales), but the opportunity in all items that are otherwise not available on physical stores. Once you look at that perspective, Chris claims, there is no debate.
Chris also goes into explaining why this is relevant to the mainstream folks and why they can’t ignore it.
Thanks to Errol Smith for pointing this out on the original Venturewoods post.
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Isn’t it amazing that some of us here at VentureWoods had the opportunity to read and debate an article originally published in the Wall Street Journal, about a topic of specific interest to all of us but which would other wise be out of ‘reach’? 🙂
That’s it. Look at the sheer size and variety offered by Long Tail. When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google makes most of its money off small advertisers and eBay is mostly tail as well – niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.
As such the Rules of Long Tail defined by Chirs – (a) Make everything available (b) Cut the price in half. Now lower it (c) Help me find it – are equally applicable for even the mainstream guys.
But then who knows what’s going to be defined as `mainstream’ in future…?