What is the Long Tail?

I've been struggling to come up with a pithy definition of the Long Tail, something longer than a bumper sticker and shorter than an elevator pitch. So I'm going to give it a few goes here and perhaps you, the wise participants in this conversation, can tell me which resonates most (note: some of these are my own, others are stolen from other people's attempt to define it). Pithy construction and TypePad layout flexibility allowing, I may offer the winner a permanent place at the top of this blog.

A) The Long Tail is the infinite shelf-space effect--the new mass market of niches that rises when the existing bottlenecks in distribution that favor hits are removed.

B) The Long Tail is the myriad of niche products whose collective market share can rival the blockbusters.

C) New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing and marketing are resetting the definition of what’s commercially viable across the board, turning sub-economic customers, products and markets into economic ones and creating a Long Tail of demand.

D) The Long Tail is about the economics of abundance—what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.

E) The Long Tail is the story of how formerly sub-economic products and customers are suddenly becoming the biggest market of all.

F) None of the above. Please try harder.

Comments

[Mark]

D comes closest for me. If you can stand a little advice from an old (but not yet grizzled) former newspaper editor: simplify, simplify, simplify.

Great idea, great blog. Every time I read it, it makes my head hurt (but in a good way).

[Nick Douglas]

E works best for me.

[Mike]

I vote for D. Seems the clearest, and the least "slogan" like.

[Mike Kerrigan]

I'd have to go for 'F'. All the definitions you offered explain how new technologies are allowing the Long Tail to be exploited without explaining the Long Tail itself. The Long Tail existed before there were more effective methods to satisfy (some) of the demand it contains. There's a reason why there's enough 80's hair band music around to fill a Tower Records music store; the music from bands that didn't achieve mainstream success still had enough of a following within the Long Tail to make producing an album or two seem worthwhile.

The Long Tail exists within a broad range of human interests. Arguably, everything from art through food tastes, even politics and religion have a Long Tail within them.

I don't know if I have a great definition for the Long Tail to offer, but since I've rejected the others, I should give it a shot:

'The Long Tail comprises the almost infinite variety of human interests and desires that mainstream offerings cannot fully satisfy.'

[Rob Clark]

When discussing the concept of The Long Tail with friends and associates, I've actually been using a phrase from your Dec. 23rd entry, "A small number times a very big number equals a big number".

It gets the point across immediately, and from there I can move on to talk about methods, technologies, variations and opportunities.

[John Thacker]

The Long Tail is (how technology is) combining the efficiency of mass production with the variety of custom craftsmanship, leading to everything being available to everyone.

[dthree]

None of those really resonate, since I have to agree with Kerrigan that they describe the technolgy better than the effect. I will give it a shot:

The long tail is the market sector that appears when a retailer uses new technology to simultaneously increase both the product selection and the potential customer base by an order of magnitude or more. This allows retailers to connect more customers to a wider variety of products, finding profitability in everything down to the least popular available.

[dthree]

I got a new one I think might be better:

Which is better, selling 1 Britney Spears CD to 1,000,000 people or selling 100,000 different, obscure CDs to 10 people each?

[Jaxon Rice]

I think the answer lies in the simple version of "D".

"The economics of abundance"

[Al Abut]

Rob Clark: "When discussing the concept of The Long Tail with friends and associates, I've actually been using a phrase from your Dec. 23rd entry, 'A small number times a very big number equals a big number'."

Good Lord, me too and I didn't even realizes that's where I lifted it from! That's the phrase I used when I blogged that the long tail effect wasn't just for buying stuff and that the private donations for the tsunami have been staggering just for this reason. And it neatly solves Mike Kerrigan's observation: "All the definitions you offered explain how new technologies are allowing the Long Tail to be exploited without explaining the Long Tail itself".

If you want even shorter and pithier (think like a marketer), how about "The Real New Economy" ;)

[Jim Treacher]

I think Don Henley said it best: "Everything, all the time."

[Jim Treacher]

(Life in the vast lane?)

[ed nixon]

All of the candidates containing "sub-economic" are non-starters for me. What does that mean?

And, did you know that something about your weblog software, my browser (Mozilla) and everything in between seems to disable the direction, Home and End keys in this window? Editing web forms is hard enought already.

Cheers. ...edN

[Joshua Wood]

I like D the best. I think of the Long Tail as Reaganomics in reverse. It Trickles Up.

[NickL]

Good comment. Trickle Up Economics is pretty good.

All your options above are too long, in my opinion.

[Alan Levine]

Sorr, but "F"... all the choices focus on marketing economics, when it is really a phenomena of networks.

But I guess in marketing a book that is the target.

[Another Mark]

I'd vote for a bumper sticker:

Your current logo (distribution graph showing long tail in yellow) with half of your text at (E) beneath it, "...how formerly sub-economic products and customers are suddenly becoming the biggest market of all."

Hyperlink this to an elevator pitch with links in turn to the Wired article and later book. Also add a backlink to the blog. I like (C) best as the beginning of the elevator pitch.

This way, when I drop the phrase "long tail" in an online conversation, I can easily give folks a way to drill down as deep as they want.

Thanks for thinking about this--I often come across websites with good ideas, but that just take too much digging before the audience can "get it".

[Mark Wubben]

My vote goes out to "A small number times a very big number equals a big number". It perfectly explains what the Long Tail is about... can't think of anything better.

Ed, the page has a rather long sidebar, so if you use the `End` button you'll go to the bottom of this sidebar, but you no longer see this post.

[Zagrev]

I have to agree that the current definitions talk about the why, not the what.

G) The Long Tail is the portion of the market (demand) that is not being served by the hit products.

[Henrik Torstensson]

I think that Zagrev's G) definition does a really good job explaining what The Long Tail is.

[ken]

I'd go with a variant of D, but shorter.

The long tail is:

"The efficiency of abundance."

[Robert Young]

Long Tail = Digital x Network (or Viral) Multiplier

[Noah Brier]

Lots of great ideas here. Here's my best shot, which tries to incorporate some of the comments people made. (I chose to include lots of different words because I'm not quite sure which to use.):

The Long Tail is the other 80 percent of information/data/goods/the world, which before digital technology was near-impossible to archive/store/sell/distribute effectively.

Hope that's useful.

[Frank Ruscica]

IMHO, you should focus on the benefit conferred, via an intuitive analogy.

One possibility:

The Long Tail: The Minor Leagues for The Rest Of Us.

Hmmm...

This is not really optimal, though, as it fails to capture the LT's profoundly inclusive and meritocratic nature...

Hope this helps...

[kip]

I like D, but it doesn't quite capture the idea that it's lots of little guys buying lots of little stuff. dthree nailed it:

I got a new one I think might be better:
Which is better, selling 1 Britney Spears CD to 1,000,000 people or selling 100,000 different, obscure CDs to 10 people each?
Posted by: dthree | January 6, 2005 11:42 PM

...and even then, it's (the collective power of) a hundred small companies selling a thousand cd's to ten people each.

Great blog, great concept, great read.

ps what kind of animal is a log?

[Scott]

I like option D best. Gotta have the word economics in there somewhere...

[Noah Brier]

Can't stop thinking about this, how does this one work?

The Long Tail is the story of how unlimited digital space has flipped traditional rules of hit-driven economies on its head.

Wrote more about it on my site: http://www.noahbrier.com/archives/2005/01/trying_to_answe.html.

Writing definitions is really hard.

[Kirsten]

A touch of "D", a touch of "F". I lean towards D because the scope seems wider than the others. I don't think of the Long Tail as being product-driven; for me it's more about information and networks than products and markets. Obviously information is a market, and the analogy applies equally well to all of it. But I prefer to think of it in broader terms. I'd rather see it realize its potential for education and knowledge exchange, rather than being exploited for yet more economics and marketing.

[Jim Bursch]

The long tail is that part of the economy that has always existed and has suddenly been "discovered" by a media that has been myopically focussed on the other end of the "tail".

Get over yourself.

[Tom Kelley]

I love this concept and have been telling anyone who will listen about it since the day the article came out. What I think's missing in options A thru D (though it's buried in C) is the concept of conquering distance. My suggestion would be something like "The Long Tail is about conquering the barriers of distance to serve widely dispersed micro markets that collectively rival the more concentrated mass markets."

[Scott Knowles]

for some reason "life in the vast lane" really does it for me (from Jim Treacher, above). That's the ad guy in me coming out ... so will probably be a headline somewhere before you know it. Jim, make sure you collect.

[Nathan Howell]

A. D is close, but A is (IMHO) a simpler, clearer version. Maybe some clever combination of the two could work.

[Gary Potter]

I'll check in with B adding that the while niches have smaller sweet spots, there are many more which makes the sweet spots easier to hit. My industry is travel and while we don't need shelf space for what sold, flexibility in packaging is very important.

[Eric Etheridge]

"The end of the 80/20 rule"

[Tony Brice]

B) is good within the product/sales realm of the concept. Because I agree, however, with Mike Kerrigan's comments from January 6 ('The Long Tail comprises the almost infinite variety of human interests and desires that mainstream offerings cannot fully satisfy), I have to go with F) as well.

How about the following --

The Long Tail represents the super-heterogeneity that flows from a limitless digital universe.

[Mike Kerrigan]

I really like the phrase that was offered above:

"A small number times a very big number equals a big number"

...although it's better used as an explanation of why the Long Tail is important rather than as a definition of the Long Tail itself.

Jim Bursch is right when he states that, "The long tail is that part of the economy that has always existed" but he's wrong to dismiss new found excitement over it. Chris is demonstrating how new technology is allowing people's desires to be better satisfied by products further down the Long Tail.

That said, I think my definition above is unsatisfactory because it describes why Long Tail exists rather than defining it. I love the phrase "moving people down the Long Tail" that Chris employs fairly often because it encapsulates the essence of what all attempts to exploit the Long Tail try to do.

The goal isn't to try to create new demand, but to try to better satisfy people's demands by connecting them with niche products that they either couldn't previously access (reducing delivery costs) or weren't aware of (reducing information costs). Any definition of the Long Tail should nicely pair with that phrase.

Here's an amended definition that I think goes a bit further towards properly describing the Long Tail:

"The Long Tail comprises the myriad of cultural and material products created to fulfill the human interests and desires that mainstream offerings cannot fully satisfy."

It could probably still use some work, but it makes sense in the previous contexts that the Long Tail has been used. Moving someone down the Long Tail is to shift away from the mainstream towards more obscure and niche products that will hopefully better satisfy their desires.

[Brandon]

Long tail - a technological phenomenon which enables the margins to eat the headline.

[Greg]

Zagrev's G) definition helps me with one problem that I had with your A) suggestion, namely that the word hits seemed particularly ambiguous to me. I have run into this problem when I read people commenting on your article in other blogs, they tend to use the word hits or hitters to refer to products, producers, consumers, number of views on a website etc. and often within the same article.

But saying hit products, removes that ambiguity by making it the attribue of a product, namely its popularity.

I think Noah Brier had a good idea too. I would put it like this:

Long Tail-The 80% of stuff that didn't used to be worth selling.

[Bren]

Mmmm... They all seem so...academic. So, F is my vote.

I like Ken's 'Efficiency of abundance' but maybe 'efficacy' is more descriptive than 'efficiency'? I'll also throw in these bumpersticker sized offerings:

The Long Tail: When small is big
The Long Tail: When a little is a lot

And this longer version:

"When more choices become available to more consumers, the net result is an effect that dwarfs any single blockbuster/charttopping/megahit/(insert your own adjective) offering."

[Eric Spiegelman]

How's this:

The “Long Tail” refers to that certain economic phenomenon, realized by internet retailers who can offer customers an infinite array of choices, when catering to low-demand, niche markets becomes more profitable than focusing on high-demand, popular goods.

[kpk]

How 'bout

"Economic dark matter made visible."

"Mining the subterranean economy."

"An embarrassment of niches."

[Patrick Di Justo]

How about this:

The Long Tail = (eBay + Amazon) * Google

It's the "you can buy unheard-of stuff" aspect of eBay, added to the security and efficiency of Amazon, multiplied by Google's ability to find anything.

[Sean Devine]

I like E (the story of...) + G (comment about "the what").

[Bob Baker]

I combined parts of B and E with my own spin:

"The Long Tail is the story of how products that were once considered fringe, underground or independent now collectively make up a market share that rivals the bestsellers and blockbusters."

Artist Empowerment Blog
http://bob-baker.blogspot.com/

[Jason Foster]

"The 'long tail' is the realisation that enough small markets are woth more as much, if not more, than a few large markets."

[Kevin]

Hooray for Jason! He got it exactly right. Say at, as best you can, without jargon or marketspeak.

[Doug Stone]

In your LT (well, since you didn't get that domain, your TLT) definition, I would make sure you include something about the quality (at least in the eye of the beholder) of the products available. LT=(eBay+Amazon)*Google is a start in the right direction, because it includes the recommendation/review aspect as well as availability of small volume products. The LT refers to these products, yet then the definitions mostly speak in terms of what they are not (they're not hits, they're not Britney). So now you can get the book that will change your life, not just claim it does. LT=Democratic Marketing, because consumers will make marketers work harder to gain influence, due to the availability to the consumer of lots of product info. It has already positively influenced manufacturing quality and it may force producers to more closely fill needs. The consumer now has an alternative.

[Al Abut]

Whoa, ten points for the one I saw above: "Trickle Up Economy"

It seems like the discussion is breaking the initial task down into two components: a definition and a motto, both necessary in my opinion.

[Steve]

The long tail: The Ants Are Bigger Than The Elephant.

[Chris Anderson]

These are all great; it will be hard to pick a winner. As for "log", it's an actual typo in the dictionary.com definition of "longtail". I assume that's supposed to be "dog".

[Adam Smith]

F
None of these sound natural enough, too much jargon. Your piece in wired was great because it was written in plain English.

I'd go with something like.

"The Long Tail is the millions of products and services that are not the most popular in a category, but are still valued by someone"

I also like Greg's
"Long Tail-The 80% of stuff that didn't used to be worth selling." or a variation

and Jason's

"The 'long tail' is the realisation that enough small markets are woth more as much, if not more, than a few large markets."

[David E. Pope]

"The Long Tail: When a marketplace is no longer constrained by physical inventory, mass consumption is driven by niche interests spread across an unimaginable breadth of product offerings."

[me]

The Long Tail: When people can buy what they really want, not just something the corporate distrubution chain wants them to want.

I think of it as the tail of a scorpion reaching over it's head to sting the corporate hand around it's neck.

[Kuja]

A, definitelly

[Dean Brooks]

This may seem like too technical a comment, but for what it is worth . . .

I have done some work on reconciling Pareto/Zipf/power law curves with the increasing marginal efficiency curve known as the Wright-Henderson law (which is better known in a somewhat different form as Moore's Law of computing power). This is the law that says if you make 10 times as much of something, the unit cost will fall by about half.

I came up with a general law, which I call the "ontic" distribution, that fits quite well with all of these. Among its unexpected benefits, it can be used to forecast the durations of events, from telephone calls, to wars, to how long software clients stay supported, to how long political parties will stay in power. It also does a nice job of predicting the distribution of profits among Fortune 500 companies.

My point is, the "long tail" of book sales or TV audience share is just one consequence of a much, much wider phenomenon. It's the tip of the iceberg, one out of a range of very similar "long tail" curves. Rather than focus too closely on just the market-share curve, you should also look at the decline in unit and transaction costs as total volume expands, or the decreasing average duration of customer involvement with a given vendor, as the number of customers in a market increases.

Why? Because the phenomenon you've identified, symbolized by the Amazon booklist, is a symptom. The cause lies much deeper. Since the cost curve, customer loyalty curve, and market share curve have similar shapes, which curve is really the most important? Maybe none of them are. Maybe the shape itself and what it tells us about the natural order is the most important thing.

I hope I'm not derailing the discussion too much, but I think you need to look at the wider possibilities before settling on your theme or trying to define what is really going on. You can download a free size-law journal, Frequencies, explaining this and much more at:

http://www.ekaros.ca

[David Locke]

Back before Wal-Mart, there were small towns. Those small towns were just productive enough to send goods to the city and then later, after transporation improvements, the mass market. The people in these small towns didn't just struggle to earn a subsistance living, they thrived. And, they did that without the mass market. The success of that economic model is apparent in the built environment, in the mansions, in the castles, and in the farms.

Success was a matter of being a few bits above entropy, a few bits that we call trending to the limit. There is an infinity in that limit, a vast market.

Life itself succeeds a few bits above entropy where it is trapped by numerous limits, and yet succeeds because of physical spaces that allow and encourage transactions in the very small.

Mass markets and their triumph built a culture, a cultural gradient, a cultural topology, a culture of one that ignored the cultures of the many.

When business people talk about busting silos, they are basing that notion on homogenous technologies that ignored the cultural topology. The right software won't bust silos, but will use the cultural topologies in multi-culture corporations without insisting on line supremacy, without disregarding the economic benefits of the division on labor. Work itself will be a long tail, instead of a thin bandwidth semantics.

The long tail should be everywhere. That it isn't is a sign that the past has driven us to the wrong place.

Pareto efficencies insist on a reality of a single axis, one-dimensional metric for an n-dimensional space. Visualize that and realize just how fragile and thin the known efficencies are.

Cultures are the addresses. Cultural variation is infinite. The mass market culture is a single culture with which we transact, but don't subscribe to. I have never been a mass market. I am a market of one.

How many people live on this planet? That's how big any market is.

Do I want a CRM system? So how long can this sales rep wait? One day, oh, yeah, one day. Call it lifetime value.

[Geoff]

Long tail = pickings left after the tiger have eaten their fill