The Long Tail encompasses many

The story of “The Long Tail” is something that I haven’t given a lot of thought to up until I decided to take this class. Chris Anderson tells us a lot of things I just didn’t look at in the same way as I do now, after reading some of “The Long Tail”. It has already caused me to look at many other things, in where The Long Tail goes. Quoting Chris Anderson “And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path” they (we) go deeper and search for that alternative that has yet to be found.


Online purchasing has been around now for a while. Netflix is the latest new site for me where I can go for films. I purchase books from Amazon, sell items on Amazon and can find just about anything else I may want to buy there. Rhapsody is available for music and is talked a lot about as well as a great online service.


These sell the most sought after products (hits) but it is the products that are available on the referenced Long Tail that make the impossible to find found. This route is where the companies are selling larger numbers of different products in smaller quantities in comparison to companies that are selling fewer numbers of hits in a huge quantities.


Other way down the line films, music, books and other consumer goods are available and now I am learning may be even more valuable because they are on The Long Tail. Being one of the big hits is not the only place to be anymore, in order to prosper. “A hit and miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has the monopoly on profitability.” Chris Anderson is encouraging in so many ways.

“Making everything available” Rule number one. I couldn’t find ‘Hard Work’ at Blockbuster for sure. Chris Anderson tells us that no video store is the place to go if you like documentaries and I guess I have only recently learned this myself but now that I have Netflix I have found and watched 6 videos about yoga. These were not your normal yoga film. That’s because they are part of the “niche”, the place on The Long Tail where all the really cool stuff is. I’ll never go back – unless I want to watch one of the really raved about “hits” like “Avatar” and I can’t wait until it is way out on The Long Tail, where I know many of the movies of my long ago are sitting now, being picked up occasionally by other “niche embracers”.

Rule number two is all about economics. Put simply Chris says: “Cut the price in half. Now lower it. The way that we receive music and pay for it today “leaves no room for price experimentation by retailers.” The way to get the consumer down The Long Tail, in the niches where all the goods are is by lowering prices. Chris Anderson explains it further by saying that when a product is offered at a fair price and is good stuff on a continual basis that the free competition can be reckoned with.

Getting the help to find what I am looking for is so important to me. I do not know anything at all about MP3 players but Chris Anderson says that “the problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail.” It didn’t have the accurate licensing and agreements to offer “mainstream” music. “No popular commercial music”. Well I like the lead in. I log onto say – Zappos to shop for boots for women with large calves. I get boots at first, I browse, filter, click, search until wha – la I have 167 styles of boots for women with big calves. I place the item in the bag and read the “Customers who bought this also bought…” and hit the button below it.

“The Long Tail" works for me. I am looking forward to reading the rest of this book.
“An example of a power law graph showing popularity ranking. To the right is the long tail; to the left are the few that dominate.” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/long_tail

Powerlaw” is a distribution method. “The 80/20 rule or Pareto principle, where 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth.” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
Aggregator is “a company or service that collects al huge variety of goods and services and makes them available and easy to find, typically in a single place.” Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”
All creative people can produce something of interest and this is the democracy that Chris Anderson speaks about in “The Long Tail”. “Long Tail promises to become the crucible of creativity, a place where ideas form and grow before evolving into commercial form.”

The Long Tail
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-->Illustration by Kenneth HungThe options available to us as consumers of The Long Tail are unending. When I search for a film – say like ‘Hard Work’ by Ginny Durrin. I looked and looked for this film for use in a class last semester and couldn’t find it. Netflix didn’t even have it which I am still wondering about. I finally got the film from the star of the film herself, who is living in WA on the other side of the country. I paid $5.00 for it. This film was not found on The Long Tail route, but that is probably due to my lack of even an amateur status as a techie, hip, or economist saavy person. I expect that I could possibly be able to find that same film available on The Long Tail, but until that highly unlikely day I have my own $5.00 copy.