There is an interesting discussion going on on
Slashdot -
Chris Anderson's long tail being pulled by an
HBR article potentially debunking his Long Tail thesis, (update - its made the WSJ now -
this one hurts) though Chris's view is that one person's head is another's tail:
The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing "concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000--[...]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."
Actually, the Long Tail has been around for as long as inventory has been stored, the basic maths was done in the last century in the early days of statistics (Pareto ring a bell?). The obvious points made are that:
The whole premise of the Long Tail idea is that it's NOT a hassle for internet companies like Amazon and Apple to keep the low-volume stuff in inventory. That's what gives them an advantage over brick and mortar. If Amazon only sells 5 copies of the The "Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" a year, it only needs to keep 5 in inventory. If a chain store wants to sell the book it has to keep hundreds in inventory to ensure they have at least one in each store.
A lot of people mis-characterize the Long Tail as "making money by selling obscure stuff." That's only half of the definition. The other half is building a business where it does not cost you anything to keep lots and lots of obscure things in inventory, or alternatively, having access to millions and millions of customers, so if you sell to 1% of your market, it still adds up to something. Long tail does not work unless all of those 1% niches add up to 80% of the total market or unless you sell to 1% of a billion people. The internet helps businesses do both of these things.
There is one real concern I have of Long Tail theory, which is that another impact of low transaction cost networks is you get positive return dynamics, ie the rich get richer - faster - and I've not seen a convincing argument as to why this dynamic doesn't occur as the endgame in any Long Tail initial condition system.
This discussion however was my favourite:
(Person One) But then try to explain porn websites. There is a lot of tail to be hit there.
(Person Two) And lots of head too...
I love Slashdot discussions, there is a rigour and sharpness, as well as irreverence, that I think is missing in social aggregators such as Friendfeed. I'm not sure why......
