Sunday, November 23, 2008

The Long Tail Is Dead

Sayeth The Register, quoting official Long Tail promoter Chris Anderson.

Money quote:
"I'll end by conceding a point: It's hard to make money in the Tail," Anderson wrote. "The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change."
This does not mean, of course, that no one can ever make money on something that isn't the very biggest thing ever. But most of the money to be made in any particular market has been pretty conclusively proven to be in the top cluster.

As many of us have said for a long time, the Long Tail may indeed be very long, but it's very, very thin...and so adds up to less than many people hoped. C'est la vie.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Long tail as a business model only made sense for the Amazons and Googles of this world, companies that function as a sort of central repository for certain items where they make money on every transaction but don't depend on selling any particular item. For publishers and similar businesses thar do depend on selling specific items, it won't work.

(Also: grandma, eggs, suck.)

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