The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More |  | Author: Chris Anderson
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $0.01
as of 7/29/2010 11:55 CDT details
You Save: $24.94 (100%)
New (98) Used (228) Collectible (8) from $0.01
Seller: goodwillny
Rating:  198 reviews
Sales Rank: 137388
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6 x 0.6
ISBN: 1401302378
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.802
EAN: 9781401302375
ASIN: 1401302378
Publication Date: July 11, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781401302375 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone? "The Long Tail" is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google. However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of whatÂ’s commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 198
 Insights that influence Google's strategic thinking. October 17, 2006
Golden Lion (North Ogden, Ut United States)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
98 Rule: Netflix reckoned that 95 percent of its 25,000 DVDs rented at least once a quarter. Amazon using an independent academic research on its book sales suggested that 98 percent of its top 100,000 books sold at least once a quarter. Digital space cost per DVD is very cheap and represent almost no physical inventory space excepting magnetic medium storage. In the sale of one or two DVDs, the traditional retail runs out of steam because it can turn inventory fast enough to pay for physical space, but the economics of online retail keep going. Eventually, Amazon will localize and print digital media using high-speed printers producing a book in seconds from an electronic catalog, the birth of a book replication. DVDs will be replaced by wireless iPods, who are paying subscribers to iTunes, will increase the speed of distribution and volume of sales of the media they prefer. The 80/20 rules are changing.
Twenty-first Century economics: Here are the conclusions about the long tail: 1. the tail of available variety is far longer than realized 2. building the long tail of products is now economically feasible 3. all those niches, when aggregated can make up a significant market-seemed undisputable, especially backed up with heretofore unseen data. "Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded commodities to becoming mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with thousand little indulgences that set us apart from others."
Markets without end: RealNetworks, Rhapsody offers more than 1.5 million tracks. Rhapsody carries 4,500 unique CD titles and the top 4,500 albums account for the top 25,000 tracks. The downloads area under the long tail curve consisting of songs downloaded an average of 250 times a month quickly add up, totaling 22 million downloads a month, nearly a quarter of Rhapsody's total business. The amazing fact is demand exists for almost every track in Rhapsody's infinite-shelf-spaced inventory. The internet has created a seemingly infinite abundance of digital medium, commodity access, and diversity of products. A very big number multiplied by a small number is still a relatively big number. For companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Rhapsody the fastest growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren't available in traditional physical retail stores. Over 99 percent of musical albums on the market are not available at Wal-mart. Out of the more than 200,000 films, TV shows, documentaries, and other videos that have been released commercially, Blockbuster only carries 3,000. However, Blockbuster could transform its business taking advantage of the long tail by implementing digital downloads equipment to CD or iPod, in its stores.
The Ultimate Catalog: "The rise of ecommerce on the Web in the early 1990s started by simply building on the catalog model with convenient ordering". The internet provided a way to offer a catalogue to everyone. Bezos came up with the idea: "picking a category where you could substantially improve the customer experience along a dimension that could only be done on the Web." Amazon works because 1. large selection is important in the customer experience 2. a big catalogue on paper is impractical 3. there are more than 100,000 books a year published 4. Amazon was the first site where a customer could buy from over a million books. Today, online shopping has passed up catalogue shopping and represents 5 percent of the retail business and growing at 25 percent a year. If Amazon reaches 15 percent of retail that would equate to $12 trillion of the American economy. Demand must follow new supply otherwise the long tail would wither and die.
The six themes of the long tail are: 1. there are far more niche goods than hits 2. the cost of reaching those niches is falling dramatically 3. Consumers must be given ways to find niches that suit their particular needs and interests 4. Once there's massively expanded variety and the filter to sort through it, the demand curve flattens. The hits are relatively less popular and the niches more relevant. 5. There are so many niche products that collectively they can comprise a market rivaling the hits. 6. Once all this is put in place, the natural shape of the demand is revealed.
Scarcity is not a function of limited natural resources, but it is having enough people. "Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge." People through creativity increase the population of available goods manifold. The second force is cutting the cost of consumption by democratizing distribution. The internet makes the average person a distributor. The third force is connect supply with demand. The internet lowers consumer search costs of find niche content.
Long tail rules: 1. Use virtual inventories where physical products are stored in a partner's warehouse but display on the business website. 2. Let the customers do the work, self-service maintenance of their data and preferences. 3. One distribution method does not fit all. 4. One product does not fit all 5. One price does not fit all 6. Share information.
A witty look at the ways cyberspace rewrites retailing's rules September 25, 2006
Rolf Dobelli (Switzerland)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Does the modern world of online markets make you feel like Rip Van Winkle, who awoke from a 20-year nap to find a changed society? Author Chris Anderson has your wake-up call. With hard facts, charts and numbers, plus futuristic insights, Anderson decodes the mysteries of online marketing, Internet-based commerce and other New Age economic realities. His calculations, public feedback and extensive research offer more than just statistics for the sake of proving his point: Online retailing has a long reach into niche markets. This gives its products longevity that stores with finite shelf space can't match, no matter how much steam they get from short-lived, blockbuster products. Anderson credibly explains the decline in box office sales and the rise of niche companies such as Netflix and iTunes. Despite a few redundancies (he believes in thorough explanations), keep on reading. You won't mind: the text is a pleasure, written with wit, style and expertise. We recommend it to Luddites, old school business operators, anyone in entertainment or retail, and New Age Internet-based marketers (although you probably already know just how long this tail can be).
BRILLIANT - The best business book of 2006 July 23, 2007
G. Fisher (South Africa)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Different types of books serve different purposes, some books tell great stories that motivate and inspire us, other books give practical "how to" advice, others enable us to escape to a world miles away from reality, while others help us make sense of a world that we otherwise wouldn't understand. I love books that fall into the last category. Some of the recent "classics" in this category include The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki) and The World is Flat (Tomas Friedman).
The Long Tail is a brilliant book written with similar wisdom and research as these "classics". In the Long Tail, Chris Andersen (Editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of the Long Tail) explains how the internet is creating distinct shifts in economics and culture. The internet provides consumers with more choice and better search capabilities across different products enabling them to make buying decisions that link closely to their specific interests and needs. This ultimately means that for certain niche products there is an increase in both supply and demand. The internet creates more consumer choice, therefore the demand curve for goods is flattening meaning there is less demand the traditionally popular items (e.g. Brittany Spears and Wilber Smith) and more demand for traditionally less popular items (e.g. Nikolaus Von Knorring, a Swedish soft rock artist and Saltwater Fly Tying, a book by Frank Wentink) creating a long tail on the demand curve. The author uses a number of different and interesting examples to illustrate this phenomenon. In the case of books, a traditional bookstore (e.g. Exclusive Books in South Africa) will typically stock up to 150000 titles in its largest store. This means that consumers must find what they want in amongst those 150000 titles if they are to buy a book. At the same time it is pretty difficult to search books in a bookstore because you physically need to browse through titles on the shelf. The result of this is that certain "blockbuster" books are pushed and less popular books with a niche focus are ignored. The internet changes this equation completely. Firstly, [...] offers the consumer access to 4.5 million book titles and enables them to search for very specific themes and topics in amongst those 4.5 million titles. This means that titles that were previously ignored are being purchased by individuals with very specific interests. In my own case I recently found a book on [...] entitled "Researching Entrepreneurship" written by a Professor from Brisbane. 15 years ago I would probably never have even known that this title existed whereas now I was able to purchase it and search other titles purchased by people with the same interest. This concept is exaggerated in the world of music because digital music is not only stored and marketed on the internet, but online music it is highly searchable and is downloadable meaning that you don't even need to rely on a courier service to deliver the end product.
As we look to the future the Long Tail concept has important implications for:
Movies and DVD's with a shift from the traditional DVD store and cinema to Netflix and online movie downloads;
Newspapers and magazines with a shift away from paper toward online publishing and blogs;
Travel with a shift away from travel agents towards self service via the internet.
The Long Tail phenomenon is happening and is becoming more and more important as bandwidth increases and more and more products and marketed and sold via the internet.
We are entering an era where niche markets will emerge rapidly. Anderson explains why in this compelling book. May 27, 2007
J. Revel (USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Long Tail, studies the phenomenon that is taking place as a result of the internet. In the past, most retailers concentrated in the small part of the products and services that represented the largest chunk of the perceived market. This, of course, is changing due to the ability of the internet to link all those products that don't sell as much (the long tail) with millions of buyers that are interested in these products but that are not conveniently located in a geographically small area for a traditional retailer to take interest in. For example, I was recently interested in purchasing a particular office supply product for an old machine that is no longer being sold. I could not find this item in any of the retailers in my area because retailers have limited shelf space and cannot carry every item available. As it turns out this machine that I own , and is no longer being made, is owned by thousands of people around the world and all of them need parts for it. The internet allows a retailer to carry that part to satisfy the need of those few thousands of worldwide clients. The book gives many similar examples in a variety of industries. This "long tail" as the author has called it represents a new era of variety and abundance. As the author writes "The era of the one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes". This is an important book for the new economic era that we are entering rapidly.
Great insight into what is going on July 9, 2007
T. Stanley (Tucson, AZ United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a great book! The subtitle is: why the future of business is selling less of more - the niche markets, and refers to the long tail found in a stats graph, where you have the bell portion pushed to the left (representing the majority or more popular items) and then a long tail that goes on exponentially - never getting to zero. We, as consumers, have more choices and by having more choices what we choose will have more outcomes. For example, he talks about when he (and myself) were growing up in the 70's only had 3 or 4 TV stations to choose from, so we all watched the same thing. Now, we have 100 TV stations, movies on TV and DVD and the internet to take our time in the evening - so instead of 3 or 4 stations vying for our attention to get the largest share of the viewers (say 30%), there are hundreds of ways to spend our time so the viewership will never probably be that high again. So looking at a graph, there are the few shows that get a good share of the viewership, but if one was to poll everyone to see what they watched, the choices would be almost unlimited - the long tail. What he is getting at is the niche markets - markets that are so small that they never existed before mostly because they were cost prohibited. Now however, because of the internet (no brick/morter buildings to support and depending on the product, no product to house) people can offer more choices and at a reduced cost. One example of this is iTunes. Apple has no CDs to store - just tunes (or audiobooks) on servers, so they can store tunes that are popular just as easily as tunes that are less popular. What is amazing is that every one of their 1 million tunes has been purchased at least once. Traditional stores could not justify shelf space for an item that just sold once or twice a year, but a virtual store can. And the non-traditional stores find that having more alternatives creates a market of alternatives, doesn't matter what the atlernative is - music, videos, books - there is a market for it all, albeit a small market, but alot of small markets add up to a large market. He talks of companies that created markets - Sears and Robuck, amazon, Apple, Netflix, Rhapsody. He also talks about people who created their own market because of their ability to be producers - creating something, putting it on the Internet, and gaining a following - some later go on to create things for money, as in bands who first post music they created, mixed and posted all from their home computer and then sells singles or I was thinking of the person who has a blog and goes on to create a blook, self-published by Lulu, sold on Amazon, wins a Blooker award and is hyped on NPR - which creates more demand. This happened with Colby Buzzell's My War:Killing Time in Iraq. As the cost of doing business, creating a market goes down, and becomes more available to more people, creating more choices, more niche markets are created. The more niche markets, the traditional markets find themselves less powerful. Some adapt others don't. And we know that someone/something doesn't adapt to new surroundings they cannot survive and I believe that is what we are seeing in TV today - especially the big 3 scrambling for the viewership numbers that no longer exists. We all see the adds for Netflix and iTunes, but until I read this book, I never realized how great their influence was!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 198
|
|
|
