Wednesday May 26, 2010 - …Retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities.
Devin Harley did a fine job presenting this current phenomena occurring in business. Devin describes the meat-on-the-bones as, “20% of the (fill in the blank) owns, does, buys, creates, and possesses 80% of the (fill in the blank).
In the case of Long Tail and movie rentals, Netflix has over forty thousand (40,000) titles, while Blockbuster has in-store three thousand (3,000). Blockbuster’s six hundred (600) titles make up 80% of their sales. Devin pointed out, “Blockbuster has more popular titles, and Netflix has the popular and not so popular ones as well. They sell larger quantities of downloads of the movies that are not that common. That is where they make most of their money,” She adds,” The tail is shortened and so only adds up to 20%. But if you keep extending the tail from 3001 to 40,000, and all the tiles sell if only a couple times, they'd add up to many more overall sales at the end of the tail”
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief of Wired was the “label maker” for the term “Long Tail”, and yet another example is seen in a ten year period of air travel in the United Kingdom. Devin discovered that, “…from 1998-2008 the top 50 destinations from the UK (the “head” of travel” fell from 36% of the total to just 26%, while everything else (the “tail”) grew.”
Devin explained that with tagging, blogging, and sharing systems, you are able to find exactly what you want faster and more reliable.
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