Long Tail Marketing

Had lunch with Chow at Saffron yesterday and had a meeting of the minds on a hot new topic for me-Long tail marketing. He just had an encounter with a Search engine marketing company out of Mumbai and I have been extolling the virtues of SEO- search engine optimization with my IT partner from Mumbai. Here's the marketing model that drives amazon.com and iTunes and is fast democratising the consumer.


Long Tail Marketing is a term coined by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson. It is a way to economically increase revenue from hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of niche markets.

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.

successful long tail marketers include Amazon with their 200k+ listings of books, some which only sell a few times a year Cafe Press with their thousands of websites that each sell customized clothing, hats and mugs printed on demand is another example of a company using Long Tail marketing.

As Chris said in his wired article, Long Tail marketing is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at notables to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

Read the entire article here:

Long Tail at Wired Magazine