Reading: The Long Tail

One of my Christmas gifts was The Long Tail. What is the long tail? It is the part of a smoothly-decaying curve that extends out to infinity. The tail is often time dependent, for example the number of people that see a hit movie. The tail can also compare the sales/usage of some items. For example, sales of albums by Garth Brooks, Allan Jackson, Kris Kristofferson, and Terry Bradshaw. Albums by both Terry Bradshaw and Kris Kristofferson would be on the right of the curve and significantly lower than sales of albums by Garth Brooks or Allan Jackson (if Garth Brooks releases a new album, it will sell many millions and will be at the head of the curve). Wonder how many people picked up copies of albums by Terry Bradshaw after Don Imus pulled out the covers and played music from them on his show?

Wikipedia has a very good description of the long tail. It's the short version. The book describes numerous examples of the long tail in various fields.

Bottom line: A business can make quite a bit of money selling many items in the long tail. This is part of Amazon's success---they can sell many obscure books/CDs/DVDs that a typical store does not have room to store.

Tags: Books