Chasing the Long Tail, Part I

The Long Tail is a term coined by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson to describe the tendency of companies such as Amazon.com and Netflix to realize a significant profit from adding large quantities of less popular or obscure items to their inventory right along with widely popular ones. These thousands of inexpensive obscure titles often collectively match the popularity of a mega-blockbuster, for the same price or less. Anderson describes the effect in his (must-read) book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. According to the Wikipedia article on the topic:

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. Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, that showed that a significant portion of Amazon.com's sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores.

In other words, quantity over popularity (or even quality), a model where so-called "B" movies collectively equal a blockbuster in revenue.

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The Long Tail isn't just applicable to ecommerce. Bloggers, for example, see the same effect the longer they blog. One really popular post that generates an enormous amount of traffic may become overshadowed by years of boring, less-popular posts, your very own long tail. Each page on a website of any type becomes yet another entry-point that gets indexed by Google. Your posted pic of Paris Hilton's boob slippage may end up with less traffic on a day-to-day basis than the hundreds of articles you've written about your cats. To Google it's all the same. While keywords such as "boob" may be more popular and generate a hundred hits in a day, various combinations of keywords that generate a few hits, let's say one each, collectively outshine your Hilton exposé if there's enough of them. In a nutshell: One thousand blog posts with one reader each per day generates one thousand hits for your site, far outshining your popular post that generated one hundred hits.

This is why you should stop procrastinating and go start your blog already, just to get that long tail growing. Fret not my blogging friends if your blog sucks. The more you post that garbage the more traffic you'll receive, even if it does suck something fierce.

In Part II we'll examine an experiment I'm conducting on the Long Tail concept.