This link has been bookmarked by 8 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Jul 2006, by Kevin Wen.
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M Gfrom VentureBlog
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Scarcity of attention and space were the cause of the 80/20 rule; the Internet is changing that
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Once you start to think of the world in those terms, it is clear that most of the successful Internet companies fall into exactly that category: business models aggregating the untapped tail.
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Once you start to think of the world in those terms, it is clear that most of the successful Internet companies fall into exactly that category: business models aggregating the untapped tail.
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... (The) 80/20 rule exists in the physical world because you chop off the long tail. In music, for example, Britney, Santana, Madonna and a few others represent the very few artists (well, more like 1%) that account for huge sales. However, there are literally hundreds of thousands of smaller artists that have tiny sales. Historically, these artists have never been carried in record shops...
However, many of the Internet media companies are different... They sold the same things everybody else did, but at better prices. Then a funny thing happened -- suddenly they noticed that more and more sales were coming from the tail. That is, they were selling a lot of the items that physical stores didn't carry... (Over) 50% of Amazon's media profits come from sales past the top 100,000 titles. More than 50% of Rhapsody's business is streaming songs past the top 10,000 tracks. -
... (The) 80/20 rule exists in the physical world because you chop off the long tail. In music, for example, Britney, Santana, Madonna and a few others represent the very few artists (well, more like 1%) that account for huge sales. However, there are literally hundreds of thousands of smaller artists that have tiny sales. Historically, these artists have never been carried in record shops...
However, many of the Internet media companies are different... They sold the same things everybody else did, but at better prices. Then a funny thing happened -- suddenly they noticed that more and more sales were coming from the tail. That is, they were selling a lot of the items that physical stores didn't carry... (Over) 50% of Amazon's media profits come from sales past the top 100,000 titles. More than 50% of Rhapsody's business is streaming songs past the top 10,000 tracks.
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The 80/20 rule is a rule of thumb every startup should know. We used to use it in consulting when reorganizing sales forces - 80% of your sales would usually be from 20% of your customers. Of course, it was never precisely the way it worked, but it was usually close because it is the nature of power laws. For startups, economizing on time, management effort, and money has to be second nature. They should constantly be going after the 20% of the effort that provides 80% of the benefit. They should constantly be focusing on the 20% of their products and customers that provide 80% of the revenues.
Or should they?
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