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The Long Tail explains why the big commercial hit is dead, how businesses can and will generate most of their future revenue from a long tail of niche products, which serve even the rarest customer needs, and what you can do to embrace this idea today.
The Long Tail explains why the big commercial hit is dead, how businesses can and will generate most of their future revenue from a long tail of niche products, which serve even the rarest customer needs, and what you can do to embrace this idea today.
You’ve probably at some point seen the popular “hockey stick curve” in some form or the other. A very fat, short head, which carries most of the revenue of a business in just a few products, for example, followed by a loooong, flat tail of mildly selling niche products.
It’s about the top result in any Google top 10, the most popular ice-cream flavor, or the highest-grossing movies, and the story is always the same: get through the long, hard dip, because it pays disproportionately to be number one. However, when it comes to online business, a curious thing is happening: if you combine all the products from the long tail and compare their share of the total revenue to the top performers, the two are almost equal.
What Chris found out is that if you can offer a sufficiently large number of niche products, they can compete with the bestsellers.
For example, Amazon offers over 11 million books right now, when even the biggest book stores can’t stack more than 200,000. What they found is that 30% of all books bought are those you can’t find in an average book store. Similarly, Napster offered 4.5 million songs at its height, every single one of which was played at least once a month.
If the average product price is the same (as is for most music streaming, for example), it doesn’t even matter whether you sell a hit or an old folk song – a sale is a sale. The long tail comes down to the idea that nowadays, a big number of unpopular products can compete with a small number of popular ones.
The moment you leave the store with a new laptop in your hands, you are a creator. You then own a music production studio, a typewriter, a professional video editing system and a megaphone to speak to the world, all in one. Because the means of production are now available to everyone, the tail has completely exploded in length, and it keeps getting longer. Every day people create more and more things online. I’ve been up for five hours today, in which two million (!) blog posts have been published already. Within the next 24 hours, six million videos will be uploaded to Youtube, 500 million tweets sent on Twitter and 60 million photos uploaded to Instagram. Because producing content has become so cheap, the barrier for people to do…
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Get the complete summary in the appOnline, a huge number of mildly popular products can outsell a small number of evergreen hits.
Since everyone can now produce their own content, the tail keeps getting longer.
Aggregators make accessing niche products easier, which increases profits and makes the tail fatter.
"The Long Tail" is a strong fit if you want practical ideas around business, economics, entrepreneurship—especially themes like online, a huge number of mildly popular products can outsell a small number of evergreen hits; since everyone can now produce their own content, the tail keeps getting longer. The MinuteRead summary distills these concepts into a focused read, whether you're deciding whether to buy the book or applying its lessons at work.
Motivated to help readers with the Long Tail explains why the big commercial hit is dead, Chris Anderson wrote “The Long Tail” to package those ideas for a fast, focused read. In “The Long Tail”, Chris Anderson focuses on the Long Tail explains why the big commercial hit is dead. Through “The Long Tail”, Chris Anderson distills the core ideas on business into lessons readers can absorb in a single short sitting. Readers turn to this work when they want Chris Anderson's perspective on the subject…
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