Academic research on the Long Tail

One of the great things about setting out to do proper research on a subject is that it tends to inspire others to do the same.  So along with all the impressive business analysis of the Long Tail that we've been chronicling here, there's quite of bit of academic research that's starting to come out, too. Here's a round-up of some of the more interesting recent papers that have come to my attention. There are no doubt others (indeed, I know of a few coming out in journals that don't allow pre-publication posting), so I'll update this post or add another one as they cross my desk:

Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the Long Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales

Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard Business School)

Sample quote: "We study the distribution of revenues across products in the context of the U.S. home video industry for the 2000 to 2005 period. We find superstar and long-tail effects in home video sales, but each effect comes with a twist. There is a long-tail effect in that the number of titles that sell only a few copies every week increases almost twofold during our study period. But at the same time, the number of non-selling titles rises rapidly; it is now four times as high as in 2000."

Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: Modeling and Measuring the Effect of Search Cost on Product Sales Distribution

Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT), Yu “Jeffrey” Hu (Perdue University) and Duncan Simester (MIT)

Sample quote: "The 80/20 rule has proved to describe the product sales distribution very well in a traditional business environment. However, the Internet seems to have changed this balance. By greatly lowering search costs, by creating virtually unlimited “shelf space” and by facilitating powerful recommender system, information technology in general and online markets in particular have the potential to radically increase the collective share of niche products, and flatten the sales distribution."

From Niches to Riches: Anatomy of the Long Tail

Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT), Yu “Jeffrey” Hu (Purdue University) and Michael D. Smith (Carnegie Mellon University)

Sample quote: "The study used a data set collected from a medium-sized retailing company that sells the same assortment of clothing through a catalog and an Internet website. We found that, Internet customers were much more likely to by niche products. Interesting, even after controlling for customer selection bias between the two channels by focusing only on those customers who used both channels, product sales were still significantly more evenly distributed on the Internet than through the catalog channel. The more even product distribution online is consistent with the theory that lower search cost through the Internet channel, caused by Internet search, browsing, and recommendation tools, can increase the collective share of niche and obscure products, leading to a more even product sales distribution online."

The Dynamics of Viral Marketing

Jure Leskovek (Carnegie Mellon University),  Lada A. Adamic (University of Michigan) and Bernardo A. Huberman (HP Labs)

Sample quote: "We analyze how user behavior varies within user communities defined by a recommendation network. Product purchases follow a ’long tail’ where a significant share of purchases belongs to rarely sold items. We establish how the recommendation network grows over time and how effective it is from the viewpoint of the sender and receiver of the recommendations. While on average recommendations are not very effective at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, we present a model that successfully identifies communities, product and pricing categories for which viral marketing seems to be very effective"

The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship

Paul Caron (University of Cincinnati)

Sample quote: "[T]he many hundreds or thousands of law review articles with only a
few readers each may cumulatively have many readers—the proverbial “long tail.” And this “long tail” is important—because it signals the importance of microaudiences and microcommunities of scholars."

Comments

[David H. Deans]

Academic research publishing -- now there's a business model in great need of innovation. It seems that very little has changed, in meaningful terms, within this legacy sector of publishing.

Next to the non-published option, this model is surely the best method to ensure that the least amount of people read your thought-leadership work.

DHD

[Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com)]

I think it's hopeless to think of innovating the so-called academic research field. After a seemingly endless time of writing back and forth to one another, they would actually have to get involved with the real world instead of throwing worthless theories around.

[Tama Leaver]

Hi Chris,

In a slightly different academic context, last year in my Communication Studies honours course iGeneration: Digital Communication & Partcipatory Culture we talked about the Long Tail (on the basis of your Wired article, not the book) and how it relates to the ever-increasing length of copyright in the US and elsewhere. I must confess I've not finished reading the book yet, but I do wonder if Long Tail economics are at odds with the idea of the public domain or even limited copyright since the potential economic lifespan of an idea or object is potentially much longer according to your argument? As Gwyneth summarised in her final reflections in the course: "I agree that the Long Tail offers an interesting perspective upon copyright law. When the monetary value of any one product may be peaking much later than expected, or not peaking at all, but continuing to hold a constant rate of profit over time, the idea of shortening copyright life is unlikely to attract any takers among those holding the corporate strings."

Even though your last rule is to "Understand the power of free," that seems to be power granted by the copyright holder to access a fragment or their property, but even then it seems to point to the benefit of holding copyright as long as possible.

From all of this I'm wondering next time Mickey Mouse is edging toward the public domnain, might the Long Tail be an argument for a small group continuing to own his tail?

[Alex Bukinis]

Emotionalism of speech - open, spontaneous and authentic expression of all experienced feelings - and theories are continue to be thrown around endlessly, until some real-life contribution will slightly change its course...

"academic research field" it is like wring a dtailed instrucion how to use a spoon and fork, I think the lead hold no value.

[Richard Cauley]

Chris:

Thanks for this post. Looking at this post and a post from the Patently Obvious blog, I have decided to write my own article on the long tail as applied to licensing of patents. I think that it may be more of an aspiration than a reality [I think that the "distribution costs" of licensing patents may still be too high], I think it may be possible to drive even those costs down via the free web-based availability of information about such patents. Academic research shows that now over half of patents [which can cost about $30K to get] are allowed to expire for failure to pay regular maintenance fees. With some of the friction taken out of the process, this may well change.

[printer cartridges]

It’s an interesting method which make use of Google Analytics for keyword research, which is very practicable.

Long tail keywords are always formed around some core two-word phrase that is more competitive. With other words combined at such phrases, we would know which long tails are more popular.

Also, the source of traffic with those phrases are important. We may be able to tweak the phrase a bit to get more targeted traffic too. For instance, if they are from a blog and the name we’ve chosen for ourselves (in form of a keyphrase), we will be able to change it next time!