The Long Tail

There is a great article in the most recent issue of Wired Magazine: The Long Tail

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

I think this article hits the nail right smack dab on the head. One of my first posts on this blog was My Suggestion for NBC:

Here is my suggestion: Put up a pay-for-play site that would allow people to come to the main SNL site on NBC and search for the sketch they want and pay some nominal fee to watch it, perhaps just enough to pay for bandwith or something. They could even sell 15 second commercials that would run at the start of the clip as another way to build revenue.

There was more to it, but that was the general idea.

I'm in the process of building a new site that focuses on a niche market - I started it before I read the article, the article reaffirmed what I was doing. I'll share more towards the end of the month, when I'm back from my trip and done with my training class.

Comments

[K. Todd Storch]

Excellent post! I'll be referencing this soon on my blog!

Looking forward to your seeing your new site.

Todd

[Jon Strande]

Todd, Thanks! I look forward to reading what you add to the topic!!

[aleah]

Really interesting, Jon. I look forward to checking out the new mystery site soon.

I need to get back to the Think! blog soon. The posts are slowing down some. October is turning into one hell of a month. :-)

[Christopher Grove]

It’s an eye opener to see that there are so many customers for niche products; though that said, there's a lot of stuff that fits into the long tail (including stuff that may well have been mainstream at some point in the very recent past). It got me thinking about my experience in Virgin on the Champs Elysées in Paris. I went in there looking for things that I couldn’t get in Angers, which is a relatively small French town. Stuff like Imperial Teen, The Wonderstuff, Cop Shoot Cop, Black Dog, etc. probably hasn’t been heard of here (I had difficulty finding the latest Jane’s Addiction in a shop here). The salesman said that what I was looking for wouldn't sell in France... Does this mean that all of the tourists who go into that Virgin Megastore are French? I personally heard a couple of Spanish(/Portuguese/Brazillian/...?) teenage girls when going through the punk section, they were looking for the latest Rancid album I think. Is that mainstream now (France has succumbed to the prefabricated pop trend with at least as much fervour as any other country and that and [bad commercial] rap have become the majority of French chart fodder)? Or more to the point, I wonder how many albums Rancid sells to French consumers... I just think it's short-sighted to say that because a shop is in France, only French customers will go into it, given that the shop is on an avenue frequented by thousands of foreign tourists each day. I’m sure the guy worked out that I wasn’t French… Plus there’s all of the students and foreign workers based in Paris… And this is what we call a ‘flagship store’. That's lousy marketing: they're targeting the wrong people... I wonder if the same thing happens elsewhere? What's it like in the States (or elsewhere)?

[Jon Strande]

Aleah, yeah - things have slowed down over there quite a bit, huh? :-( I have a couple of thoughts brewing, hopefully I'll get some time to get over there.

Chris, great comment! It is the same here, for the most part. Stores carry the top 1,000 or fewer titles and if you want to find good stuff you have to go online or to a used CD store - which I love to do on Saturday afternoons. As for Rancid selling in France, there was a great book I read several years ago called eTopia, one of the main messages of the book is that geography is no longer important. More people need to understand that I guess...

[Christopher Grove]

I think geography is still important, but differently so. It all depends on the context: if you're on the web you have an international business. If you're in a smaller (not too touristy town) you've got a local business. But as of when you're based in a town city that does have internationals passing through, you may have an international business. It all depends on how many internationals and how often they pass through. What I'm saying is that there's more nuances to take into account, it isn't black and white any more, I agree, but there are geographical limits for some businesses. The trick is to identify if yours is or not. In the case of Virgin on the Champs Elysées, then it's obviously international. Just like the Gap and the McDonalds on the same street are. I suspect that 80 – 90 percent of the Gap’s trade comes from foreigners. You never see the Gap Paris sweatshirts on sale, strange huh? The clientel is completely different from those in the othe, less well-known Parisian Gaps. I bet that the people working in Virgin are required to be able to speak English in case they have to serve tourists, so why isn't that taken further? Surely good business sense would be that they include products that aren't necessarily to French tastes? And what does all of that say about the Virgin brand. I walked away disappointed (I guess that this is coming across), obviously because I didn’t find what I wanted, but also because I’d discovered that it was just another French record shop. A touch bigger, but that’s all. That means that each time I’m looking for something specific I’ll assume that there’s a good chance of not being able to find it there. In fact, if the salesman had just said, “sorry, we sold the last one” then I wouldn’t be writing what you’re now reading. I remember Virgin in Birmingham (UK) being pretty good, but now I wonder if that hasn’t gone downhill in terms of selection as well… Next time I’m back there, it’ll probably be a last resort if I can’t find what I want elsewhere. Basically I’ll be looking for a better option next time in Paris, Virgin hasn’t lost my custom completely, but it won’t be the first place I look, and I can’t be the only person that that salesman has said that to. So just how much potential custom have they lost I wonder…?
This is another case of the simplest form of CRM being screwed up and it impacting the brand.

[Jon Strande]

Christopher, great closing point! Anything that an employee says or does that leaves a bad impression with a customer certainly impacts the brand, no question about it. Fantastic perspective.

As for the other stuff, you just have to wonder about the policies of certain organizations... markets, as we used to know them no longer exist (can you tell I just picked up The Cluetrain Manifesto?), too many organizations are trying to appeal to the mass market... which is a mistake in my book. If you try to appeal to everyone, you risk appealing to no one... or something like that.