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“I work in one of the TOP MNCs in India. And typical to all MNCs is the bench concept - a time when you are supposed to work on enhancing your skills. So here I was scouting our library for any skill-enhancing books. I came across this book titled The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. A highly suggested book by one of my professors in IIM K, I decided to read for pleasure than to enhance my skills. And I did.
This book is an article beaten and stretched into 226 pages. You can easily read just the article The Long Tail that is quite famous and not miss anything. But the idea that Mr. Anderson conveys is so relevant in our internet driven world today that you would want to finish the book. Quite a page turner, this is.
A not so long something about The Long Tail
The concept of the long tail, drew in part from an influential February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality" 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. Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models.
Anderson argues 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."
After reading this book, whenever I hear about someone quitting to start on their own, all I can think is whether a Long tail is feasible in their business. Like Anderson points out here, what a Long tail definitely isn't, most of them don't fit into that category. But almost all internet related businesses fall in that category. For example, there's no limit to the number of songs/books/movies that can be provided to the public out there who seem to have an appetite to gobble up almost everything. True, there might not be many takers for an old and obscure song from your parents' teenage days, but by providing access to this song to anyone who might be interested, the revenue you get from it far outweighs your cost. In this case, your cost is almost nothing - another 2-3MB space on a server, which doesn't cost much for you when you have already invested in the server. And people are so different and insatiable, you cannot fail! There WILL be someone who would want that song.
Let's look at my blog (http:\\girlwithbigeyes.blogspot.com). If you draw a graph with all the blogs in our blogosphere in the X axis and their daily traffic in the Y axis, mine would be somewhere at the far end of the long tail. But still there is a small number of people who consume this blog. And for them, it matters. And that's what makes the long tail successful.”
