The Long Tail shows up in many places, but just as there is a Long Tail, there's also a Short Head to it. Chris Anderson came up with The Long Tail in 2004:
The long tail, colored in yellow.
"…relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but "the long tail" of millions of weblogs may have only a handful of links going into them. Beginning in a series of speeches in early 2004 and culminating with the publication of a Wired magazine article in October 2004, Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models. Anderson later extended it into the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006)."
But not much else has really happened with the Long Tail since 2004 except that alot more people know about it. But…what it really means is that there are a few hits, a few producers that produce most of the results and then a really long tail of results, sales, actions, you name it, that are significant in aggregate (if you add them all up) but are of generally low numbers that stretches back to …almost ….Infinity. And, as Seth Godin pointed out in 2006 - in order for there to be a Long Tail, there must be a Short Head. if you fall into the Long Tail, you can become almost invisible and unappreciated and Seth Godin brings that out in a post last July titled The longest tail - it's so short I'll just quote the entire post:
"..I stopped by a garage sale today. The guy had thousands of CDs, most of them in their wrappers. $3 each. I was excited.
Two boxes in, I felt like I was in a different universe. Every single artist was someone I had never heard of. After 25 years of buying CDs (a lot of CDs) I had come face to face with a huge Dip. It's almost impossible to buy music with no frame of reference. There were no hits, no recommendations, no "if you like x, you'll like y". I realized that the time it would take to decide if I liked an album was probably worth more than the $3 it would cost to buy one–in other words, not even worth it for 'free.'
Musicians, bloggers, writers–if you're toiling in the long tail, getting stuck at zero is now a real possibility. Being just like the other guys but trying harder is less of an effective strategy than ever before.
That's why I decided to go into Virtual World Metrics, positioning myself at IBM to be the main Virtual World Web Analyst for IBM's Virtual Business Center - I knew the Web Analytics field is now saturated with authorities, just at the SEO/SEM field is even more saturated with all kinds of authorities and snake oil too, and there was no real way to compete with them (nor do I really want to, to be honest), so I picked something no one else was doing … yet - in an insight that it would become much more valuable later - and I think I hedged my bet the right way - but only time will tell for sure. However, when Virtual Worlds becomes super hot and mainstream, and everyone else wants to do it - at least I won't be part of the "Long Tail" of people standing in line .. in that long line that is the Long Tail.
Here's what I'll be speaking about at the Web 2.0 Measurement Track of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit on October 17th in Washington DC:
Old & New Together Again for the First Time
We've been calibrating the business impact of the Internet since before the browser. Rick will relate stories of taking the measure of FTP, Gopher and USENET postings in the early '90s. Marshall is a Director of the Web Analytics Association, tasked with getting a handle on social media and Jared has written the first application for analytics for Second Life. What do these people have in common? What's changed? Come learn about much we've learned and how little we know, how far we've come and how far we have yet to go.
Wednesday - 11:10 am - Blue Ballroom
Here's where it the Long Tail stands out right now - Facebook. In a Boing Boing post today titled Long Tail vs. Short Head look at Facebook applications Mark Frauenfelder mentioned that of 5000 applications developed for Facebook, so far, there are less 84 that are popular enough to stand out (The Short Head of the Long Tail) while the rest are just invisible to most of us who use Facebook:
A couple of big hits … and the rest of this chart shows what ever else is actually popular now - and then the rest of it…..zilch, forget it - the developers of those Facebook applications won't make much money on their applications.
And I found the same thing for my own blog posts - and wrote about it late last month in a post titled 80/20 Rule for Blog Posts - Massive Traffic comes from but a few posts - that almost half of all my blog's traffic over the last 18 months was due to 2 blog posts out of more than 2400 that I've done so far!
The thing with the Long Tail - which you can't avoid - if your going to succeed and be effective ….you need to put yourself in the Short Head of the Tail.
It may be OK for Amazon.com to sell small amounts of an almost infinite inventory of books and soundtracks and make 30-40% of it's money that way - but as an individual - living in the Long Tail is really hard….which is why it's important to Stand Out - be exceptional at something that is needed, wanted and appreciated - thereby making your own Short Head of the Long Tail.
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