new scientist article argues against the long tail

[edmondscommerce]

just reading an article in the latest copy of New Scientist magazine that explains that the "long tail" effect that was expected to rock the world with the advent of online shopping has not actually materialised...

see the article here:
new scientist article (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026873.300-online-shopping-and-the-harry-potter-effect.html)

interesting and highly relevant stuff

[DotNetWebs]

Interesting article.

Thanks for posting.

Regards

Dotty

[cjd]

Yes, very interesting.

As far as Amazon goes though, I think it ignores the PR value of the 'we stock everything' message and also I noticed that a lot of what they 'stock' is actually stocked by their affiliates; so they can effectively outsource the low/non-profitable long tail to a multitude of tiny retailers.

[edmondscommerce]

yeah - what an awesome business model amazon have :-)

[Simon-M]

yeah - what an awesome business model amazon have :-)

Yes, they got themselves on Watchdog last week for selling banned stuff like pepper spray etc.

Simon

[awebapart.com]

There has been quite a lot of talk in the mobile entertainment over the past few months about how the long tail isn't working, e.g. this article (http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/31672/Mobile-contents-long-tail-disappears), something that my company (http://www.abstractworlds.com/) and other small games companies developing games for mobile phones, found out a few years ago when the mobile games market first started.

One important aspect that can affect product choice, one that we can do something about, is the mechanism of product discovery, something that in the past was very poor with mobile phones, imagine trying to browse a catalogue of hundreds of games on a small screen phone when the operator portal has no search, and you can only see a few lines of text on a screen at once. Hopefully the iPhone content and games marketplace should see a slightly fairer distribution of products sold, since the interface for product selection is better. Unfortunately there is no search when people are shopping in a real Tesco store, so just because a company gets its product somewhere on a Tesco shelf, it doesn't mean that it is going to be a success.

Unfortunately there are other factors beyond most people's control which contribute to the long tail not working, like big business branding and advertising.

There was a Ted talk given in 2005 called the Paradox of Choice (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM) by psychologist Barry Schwartz which is interesting too, and goes a little way to explain why the long tail for products isn't working.

Even if the long tail for products doesn't work, it doesn't mean that the long tail for searches for selling popular products cannot work. For instance, using long tail specific searches for selling a popular book, say optimising for the search term Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix paperback book (a long tail search term), rather than optimising for Harry Potter.

And I still think that for some companies, finding niches is a good thing, as long as you are realistic about the size of the potential market.