All Annotations of The Long Tail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[Preview]

saved by17 people, first byJamie on 2006-10-29, last byAnthony Fontana on 2008-06-25

• An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."^[5] In the same sense, the user-edited internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• where the Long Tail works, minority tastes are catered to, and individuals are offered greater choice
• Looked at from the producers' side, the Long Tail has made possible a flowering of creativity across all fields of human endeavour.
• Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article^[1]
• first coined^[3]
• concept drew in part from an influential February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality"^[4]
• Notes
• External links
• products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough
• Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith
• used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon sales and Amazon sales ranking
• consumer benefit (a.k.a. consumer surplus) from access to increased product variety in online book stores is ten times larger than their benefit from access to lower prices online
• Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail
• 72/20
• Long Tail model may lead to improvement in a society's level of culture
• earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon sales and Amazon sales ranking and found a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores.
• ^ See Brynjolfsson, Erik, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, "Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers", Management Science, Vol. 49, No. 11, November 2003, and the April 2003 working paper version available via the Social Science Research Network.
• Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough
• In the same sense, the user-edited Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low-popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Where the opportunity cost of inventory storage and distribution is high, only the most popular products are sold. But where the Long Tail works, minority tastes are catered to, and individuals are offered greater choice
• In situations where popularity is currently determined by the lowest common denominator, a Long Tail model may lead to improvement in a society's level of culture
• The Long Tail
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
• The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions (Zipf, Power laws, Pareto distributions and/or general Lévy distributions). The feature is also known as heavy tails, power-law tails, or Pareto tails.
• Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.
• The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully.
• while most of the discussion about the value of the Internet to consumers has revolved around lower prices, consumer benefit (a.k.a. consumer surplus) from access to increased product variety in online book stores is ten times larger than their benefit from access to lower prices online. Thus, the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.
• An 80/20 rule fits the distribution of product sales in the catalog channel quite well, but in the Internet channel, this rule needs to be modified to a 72/28 rule in order to fit the distribution of product sales in that channel. The difference in the sales distribution is highly significant, even after controlling for consumer differences.
• The key supply side factor that determines whether a sales distribution has a Long Tail is the cost of inventory storage and distribution
• On the demand side, tools such as search engines, recommender software and sampling tools are allowing customers to find products outside of their geographic area. The authors also look toward the future to discuss second order amplified effects of Long Tail, including the growth of markets serving smaller niches.
• The recent adoption of computer games as tools for education and training is beginning to exhibit a long-tailed pattern. It is significantly less expensive to modify a game than it has been to create unique training applications, such as those for training in business, commercial flight, and military missions. This has led some to envision a time in which game-based training devices or simulations will be available for thousands of different job descriptions.