Seth Godin and Chris Anderson keep talking about the long tail. What if the long tail didn’t matter? What if they were all wrong?
I understand the long tail. The long tail generally refers to the distribution of information as the currency of the web. Meaning access to information is worth something. And providing such access gives you value. So by monetizing the long tail it means you find a niche that is worth snagging and you own every aspect of it. The long tail implies that certain niches are ‘owned’ by the wealth owners such as those who routinely dominate information online. Good examples of information domination include Wikipedia.
But what if search were not so much about pagerank and authority and the Google dominance and more about the story telling that goes on. What if information were prioritized not by popularity but by relevance to YOU. Would the long tail be important at all ? Because what is important to you is definetly different than what’s important to me.
Deep down I think I just wish there were another player in search besides The Google. The long tail sure as heck wouldn’t mean as much. Thanks Yahoo and MSN for dropping the ball on this one.
Here’s the question of the day:
Would your online business survive without Google Search?
Originally posted on December 20, 2006 @ 1:13 am
I think Chris’s point is that you win big when you own the entire tail. iTunes, Amazon, Squidoo, Reddit… the goal is make it cheap to aggregate so that people who want only their slice still find you.
So let me see if I understand this. Basically you are advocating cheap platforms to aggregate data like the libraries of old?
My understanding of the long tail means that when marketing and/or distribution are essentially free, then someone can make money (or at least serve a market) by selling items that don’t have mass appeal – like books with a small readership. This is a change because in situations where marketing/distribution are not free, they must be amortized by selling the same item to many people.
But it only applies in situations where marketing/distribution are at a much reduced cost. The interesting observation is that in some cases the aggregate of those onesey-twosey sales can be greater than, say the top ten in popularity.
That’s interesting, but as I said it only applies in certain situations.