Will the long tail work in a small community environment?
Is it possible for the Long Tail of a community as a whole to make for a viable marketing strategy? We are about to find out as a new product is about to hit the net that will take all the services of one community and bundle them into one website in hopes to create greater demand from the community for the products that are less in demand. Not sure you got that then wait as the Long Tail of communities rolls out in the next several months.
For more on the Long Tail read from Wikipedia below:
The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was, according to Chris Anderson, first coined[2] by himself. The concept drew in part from an influential February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”[3] that noted that a 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).
Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon sales and Amazon sales ranking and found a large proportion of Amazon.com’s book sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully.
An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”[4] In the same sense, the user-edited Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low-popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.[5]
The term is derived from the XY graph that is created when charting popularity to inventory. For example, in the graph shown above the total inventory of Wikipedia articles is along the bottom line, while the popularity rating (web page hit statistics) is along the vertical axis. So, for example, the Wikipedia homepage would receive the most views and be on the far left in the green, while this page might be on the far right in the yellow, as would most of Wikipedia’s articles. The same could be said for Amazon’s book inventory or Netflix’s movie inventory. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items
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