The Long Tail

From CreativeBusiness

The Long Tail (Blog), a phrase popularised by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, is a colloquial term for a statistical distribution that shows a strongly asymmetric shape - a long, flat tail that sharply rises into a peak - such as Pareto distributions or power laws. These are different from a Gaussian (Normal) distribution in that they extend much further from the peak. For example, if you plotted the number of links that a blog has against its rank, you'd find that a small minority have a lot of links and form a spike at the head of the graph, which rapidly slopes away to a long tail of blogs with a few links; however, overall the links to blogs in the tail far outnumber links to those in the head.

Importance

The importance of the long tail in the distribution of cultural objects, such as books, is well understood. Amazon, for example, can afford to stock thousands of works that only sell one copy a year because it does not have a physical shop, where shelfspace is expensive, instead having a huge warehouse where shelfspace is cheap. This means that books which sell just one copy a year can still be stored and sold because the cost of doing so is not derivative. Brick and mortar shops, on the other hand can only afford to sell books that will pay for their own shelfspace and sales staff. This leads to them cutting off the tail, and only stocking books supposedly likely to succeed.

For Producers

For creative people the idea of the long tail is very important, as that is where almost all creative people start out: selling just a few copies of their work to just a few people. This means that the creative businessperson must be very inventive in order to make their position in the long tail tenable and to move themselves up the tail towards the head where the fewer successful creators reside.

For Distributors

The key to success in the long tail is in using distributors such as Amazon, or iTunes, which act as aggregators of longtailed creators, to their own benefit. These aggregators help the small creative businessperson by reducing their own costs of distribution and sales as well as by expanding their reach beyond both their own geographical location and their own community. Longtail distributors rely on small creators for the majority of their sales and so are generally a valuable ally creators.

The lowering of distribution costs online makes it possible for even small creators to reach a far wider audience without having to first convince a publisher, and have the publisher convince a distributor to stock their work. This allows them to focus primarily on creating, and on promoting and community building directly.