Funferal

Head and tail

The Guardian, belatedly, point to a Wired article on The Long Tail. The thesis is that, in an era of unlimited content availability, the ‘tail’ is more profitable than the items at the ‘head’ – those which would be carried in physical stores.
This is of course an enticing idea for those operating online, but the evidence cited in the Guardian excerpt doesn’t, to my mind, prove as much as might be thought. For instance, the example of Amazon having more sales of titles ranked below 130,000 (130,000 being the typical number of titles carried by a Barnes & Noble store) than of titles ranked above 130,000. But consider the nature of the Amazon customer base. Can we assume it reflects the overall public, and their buying preferences, faithfully? Is it not likely that at least some people buy some items in Barnes and Noble, and others on Amazon? Would it not make sense to compare, instead, the proportion of ‘popular’ items bought overall (that is, those bought in Barnes and Noble, and the top 130,000 or whatever items on Amazon) with the ‘tail’ – that is the residue of items sold on Amazon?
The Wired article is, overall, interesting, and somewhat compelling, but it is slights of hand such as this which grate on me.