A Long Tail Skeptic
Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal isn’t buying the Long Tail argument. Big hits still drive Hollywood and the music business. He thinks they drive sales at Amazon too. Though the company doesn’t talk about book sales, Gomes talks to ex-insiders who say the back catalog doesn’t contribute very much to sales. A New York publisher tells him that there’s no difference between book sales online and in bricks and mortar stores. Should companies expand inventories? Very carefully, especially for non digital products. But, “prudence might be difficult these days, considering the current popularity of Web utopian fantasies about the way sales of niche products can rival those of hits.” Read the whole thing here.
Filed under: Marketing by Jim Manney |
HITS STIL COUNT BUT…
My interpretation of the “long tail” arguement was not that hits don’t count any more or less than before. It’s just that with the “audience range” of the internet, there’s a demand for the “long tail” of any market’s contents. This demand would be negligible in a bricks-and-mortar store relying on physical traffic in even the larger cities - but spread over a billion customers, there’s enough demand to sustain one or more decent-sized businesses.
The other question is “how do you define the long tail”? Matehmatically, how do you distinguish a hit from a back catalog item? (I had a theory I’ve never tested, taht says use the point of inflectoin in the graph of sales/item sorted by sales…)
If it’s the top-10 in an inventory of 1000, or top 10,000 in an inventory of 10M, won’t the graph look the same? The top x% always generate y% of the cash, well out of proportion to their numbers - whether it’s Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, Tower Records, or Barnes and Noble. Amazon just has more of the rest of the items in stock.
I suspect the power of Amazon, and what got it where it is today, is their ability to deliver that tail of contents. I recall dealing with the erratic “order process” of small bookstores at the mercy of uncaring suppliers. I recall the days when the only way to find a book was “books in print” or searching the bigger libraries. Amazon HAS opened a new and different market.
Comment on August 7, 2006 @ 12:25 pm
[…] Good points. Read the whole comment here. Catholic publishers’ books are down on the long tail. Long tail marketing and long tail thinking are good for us. Filed under: Marketing by Jim Manney | […]
Pingback on August 8, 2006 @ 2:58 am