Wikipedia has a go at defining the Long Tail:
The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article[1] to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.
Hmm, that doesn’t really say much.
Basically, to the marketer, the long tail means that small percentages of really large numbers of customers can still provide an enormous amount of revenue. A couple of percentage points of a multi-billion dollar industry (like e-commerce) is some serious money.
To bloggers, this means that niche is important - a lot of niches are actually big enough to attract tens of thousands of readers, and some, many more. 0.5% of the world’s RSS-reading public is (depending on whose figures you use) still more than a million readers. Small percentages, multiplied by large numbers, equal potential success (if you’re worried about making money from your blog, that is).
To bloggers, this also means that web client compatibility is an issue - I saw a comment on a mailing list today that bugged me - a bloke who should have known better said that his company really didn’t worry about customers with Macs as they only made up a small number of the total. They’re in the web service delivery business - do you think that dismissing 6.1% of their potential customers before they’ve even reached the home page is a good idea?
This is the reason why I keep banging on about blog compatibility with Opera Mini and other mobile web browsers - even though they total less than 1% of total browser market share, they are growing rapidly. Basically, if you are a professional blogger, a 1% income loss is something that you do need to worry about - and when you’re just starting out, every reader is worth keeping.
So please, think about how you can better serve the needs of all of your readers, so that you don’t get bitten on the bum by the long tail.
1. “Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes.”
Do you dig this sentence?
2. “Long Tail” also refers to long, multi-word keyword phrases, which of course have less volume. There is a never ending debate, if you should focus on the long tail for organic search results or not.
3. You are right all sorts of browsers and operating systems should be supported. Best usability practice is simply to ignore the latest features in any language spec that is only supported on “some” browsers. Stick with the older — more widely supported — standard and you save a lot of energy that would be otherwise wasted with browserhacks, upgrading, ..
Focus on the content is a much better investment.
Hi John,
thank you for your comment.
1. I am not sure I do dig it, but if I read it right I don’t really agree with the premise that hard to find items will always be more profitable for large retailers than popular items
2. Thank you for that, and I can see how the term would apply, and I can also see how it would be the subject of much debate.
3. Thank you, and if there ever was a best practice in usability, “go with what works for everyone” would surely be it.
Best regards, Andrew