The Long Tail - Chris Anderson.

The Long Tail is a theory by Chris Anderson of a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling large number of unique items in relatively small quantities - usually selling fewer popular items in larger quantities.

We listened to an audiobook on 'The Long Tail' and here are the notes i took:

-Media's obsessed with what's hot and what's not.

-"iTunes killed the radio star"

-Hollywood down 6% last year.

-We have unlimited access to culture.

BEN:

-Downloads movies.

-Music - Copies CD's.

-Instant Messages.

-Online video games.

Ben has a choice.

-internet/broadband

-cable TV

Access!

Broadcasting: 1 show to millions

Millions of shows to 1

-Consumers like access.

Digital distribution.

'One size fits all' - Not anymore.

Access to unseen movies and music - Amazon.com/play.com/iTunes

The Long Tail.

If you produce something and make it available someone somewhere will buy it.

Downloads - No packing cost/distribution cost

No shop could carry thousands of music

Long Tale Distributions:

1) Tail of available variety

2)

3)

Google is an example of a long tail.

It turns unprofitable customers, products and companies into profitable ones.

Everything is available to everyone.

Variety.

Media in the online age.

Stuff from the internet on the long tail:

The Long Tail or long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a 'normal' or Gaussian distribution. This has gained popularity in recent times as a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The concept was popularised by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying this strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The total sales of this large number of "non-hit items" is called the Long Tail.

Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"). This is known as the Pareto principle or 80–20 rule.

The Long Tail concept has found some ground for application, research, and experimentation. It is a term used in online business, mass media, micro-finance (Grameen Bank, for example), user-driven innovation (Eric von Hippel), and social network mechanisms (e.g., crowdsourcing, crowdcasting, peer-to-peer), economic models, and marketing (viral marketing).

A frequency distribution with a long tail has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The term has also been used in the insurance business for many years.