Short piece on the Long Tail

The Long Tail How endless choice is creating unlimited demand. Chris Anderson

Back in 2006 Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail - a history of the 'hit', a definition of the Long Tail, a look at the businesses already taking advantage of it and some predictions about the future effects of the Long Tail.

If you haven't come across the term before, here's a brief explanation.

Hit lists have been around for decades. Marketing focus has traditionally been on the big hits. That's where the volume and the money is. Well, that's where it was.
There will always be top ten listings and somebody has to come first. But today, the front runners aren't packing quite the punch they once did. And the expertise involved in creating, picking and promoting hits is increasingly redundant.

Today, the internet has largely removed geography and the physical storage of inventory from the equation while at the same time introducing even greater levels of choice. Brands still fight for shelf space on retailers shelves, but retailers on the internet have no concerns about the size of their inventory. They don't have to worry about the likely popularity of an individual line based on the size of their real-world cachement area or the physical limits of their expensive high street retail space. Global reach has made niche offerings that couldn't be supported within a physical location suddenly significant.

Six major themes emerge from the book:
1 In any sector, there are more niche goods/services than 'hits'.
2 The cost of accessing these niches has fallen dramatically.
3 Massive choice needs filtering to make sense of it all.
4 With expanded choice and granular search, the niche becomes more popular than the mainstream. All the niches adds up to more than all the hits.
5 Real demand is made transparent without being hidden behind artificial scarcity brought about by lack of information, shelfspace or distribution problems.

It's a quick and easy read and all the more powerful for that. Highly recommended. Just click on the link at the top of the post to buy it from Amazon.

But what if you aren't a web retailer with a vast virtual inventory? What if you are simply promoting a service through your web site? Well the Long Tail effect will still be evident. The distribution curve of the terms used to find your site will probably show that your top ten terms account for less than 20% of all search driven visits to your site. And if they count for more than 30% then you are almost certainly missing out on your fair share of niche traffic.