Online media’s long tail

I’m sure we’ve all heard of, visited, or even bought something from the online retail giant Amazon.com. When the company first started out selling mostly CDs and books online, it ended up making more money than any physical book or music shop. Why? Because of an amazing phenomenon known today as the “long tail”.

The term “long tail” was coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired, in an article he wrote in his magazine some time last year (sorry no exact date because my old copies of Wired are in some box). The long tail was a phenomenon Anderson noticed about online retailer Amazon that made its profits grow in a way physical stores could never achieve.

Because Amazon.com has no physical storefront and no limited shelving inventory, the online retail giant ended up earning an amazing amount from the lesser-known, less-popular items it stocked. Say, the two baby-boomers who buy Beatles albums, or the handful of old girls who still adore Elvis. They all add up, and that’s what the long tail is.

Stores such as HMV and Borders that we frequent are unable to stock these “oldies” and tend to capitalise on the newer popular albums to survive.
So why does the online media have a long tail too? Because the social web (some like to call it Web 2.0) is getting more popular.

As an editor of the online technology publication TechPlanet Asia, I track the site’s statistics quite often, and most recently, I’ve noticed that many of the older, more popular stories continually get around 15-20 hits a day. Sure when it first came out it was like a few thousand hits, but that’s what’s so amazing: its always online nature enables it to be shared, linked, indexed, and read over and over again creating a gradually tapering long tail that ends only when all interest is lost on that topic.

From a PR point of view, wouldn’t it be awesome to have a story that features your client sit permanently on an ever-growing long tail? I don’t have specific numbers here, but compared to a large print daily with say 300,000 subscribers, how many actually eyeball your story, and worse still, how many people keep the article?

Even in a best effort scenario, say a really hard hitting story gets photocopied many times and passed around a community like a church, office, or even a school. But what is that compared to the millions of readers on Google News? The never-ending linking on blogs, the (I’m sure you do this) mass emails that keep rolling?

So how does a PR person take advantage of the long tail? Well, just go with the most connected sites. And that includes blogs too!

Here are a few pointers:

• Go for sites that are indexed by Google News. Unfortunately, some of the gated/paid sites don’t let Google share the news, so they end up getting a lot fewer readers.
  
• Go for sites where articles have quick links to social web portals such as Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Reddit, etc and easy tell-a-friend email mechanisms.
  
• Go for sites that don’t ever delete their content. Some more prominent media, including scientific journals, only put their online content up for a while because they make more money when readers buy the printed copies.
  
• Go for sites with permalinks. That means the URL of the article never changes. Like on Scoopasia! But seriously, some older web sites move older articles into archive on a different address. This is very important because links on blogs and social web portals will suddenly be broken and that’s the end of your story’s long tail.
  
• Go for sites with multiple region content sharing agreements. ZDnet for technology news is a good example because its Asian content gets filtered to its US, UK, and Australian sites, and vice versa.

If only there was a mechanism to tabulate the effect of the long tail on online media because I’d rather frame that report up than a clipping of a newspaper’s front page article.

Just in case you want to find out more about the long tail, Anderson’s article became a blog, which became a book, and I’m still waiting for it to ship.

By Benjamin Koe on Friday, 16 June 2006 at 11:39 AM

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