The Long Tail A Myth? Study Calls It Into Question
A Wall Street Journal Article today cites a study by Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard’s business school, entitled, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?“, which finds evidence that in the online world, consumers gravitate towards the most-popular items just as in the offline world.
The Long Tail, if you don’t already know, refers to a theory promoted by a book by Chris Anderson titled “The Long Tail”, which describes a sort of niche strategy of business, such as employed by Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities. The idea is that while you can obviously sell large numbers of a few popular items (the “head”), the cumulative, smaller number of sales of all your many less-popular items (the “tail”) might easily add up to a far greater total amount.
“Head” items shown in red, “Tail” items shown in blue
Here at Netconcepts, we’ve been promoting the Long Tail concept in relation to natural search marketing for quite some time, since we’ve witnessed how its application can directly improve a business’s overall sales numbers. Indeed, businesses often get the most sales per item for their most popular products, but those products are also often the most competed on the internet, and sometimes the hardest to promote as a result. Even in the cases of top online retailers, we’ve seen that greater bulks of traffic and associated sales may often come from the bulk of less-popular Tail products.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/02/2008
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Filed under: Marketing, Monetization of Search, Reference Material, Research and Development, SEO, Search Engine Optimization Chris Anderson, niche marketing, The Long Tail
New Columnist for Search Engine Land
I just became a new contributor for Search Engine Land with the publication of my first article today:
“Google Builds Local Map Content in 3D“. As you may recall, Danny Sullivan launched SearchEngineLand.com back in December of last year after stepping down as editor-in-chief for SearchEngineWatch.com which he’d originally founded. I’m contributing work under the Locals Only column that was earlier launched with their correspondent, Greg Sterling. As you may know, Greg Sterling was a former member of the Kelsey Group, and is widely respected as a top authority/commentator/analyst on marketing/business in the local search space.
I was really surprised and flattered to’ve been invited to contribute - I’ve long been a fan and devoted reader of the folx who worked upon SearchEngineWatch.com and now SearchEngineLand.com. I’ve also been a longtime reader of articles by Sterling, along with many others in my company, Idearc Media. I think I’m in really august company, and I know it’s going to challenge me to try to put forward work that’s worthy of appearing under their masthead along with others in the same space.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/26/2007
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Filed under: General, Local Search, Reference Material local-search-articles, Search-Engine-Land, searchengineland.com
Book Review: Getting The Most From Your Yellow Pages Advertising
Last year, I criticised a press release promoting a book by Barry Maher titled “Getting the Most from Your Yellow Pages Advertising, saying the press release was self-serving and irresponsible. I disparaged Maher, referring to him as a “so-called expert” and calling the press release “self-serving”. Maher’s press release touted advertising in print yellow pages and questioned the value of advertising online in comparison, so I was highly critical of it since I believe there’s significant value in advertising online. At the time, I thought I was justified in my criticism, since I felt he was promoting his book at the expense of bad advice to small businesses.
However, others pointed out some irony in my criticism — after all, self-promotion is by nature supposed to be beneficial to one’s self, and it’s not at all unusual to emphasize a bit of controversy to make press releases more interesting to readers. Further, Maher’s responses and comments to my blog posting were well-written, wonderfully mild, and professional — leaving me to wonder if I’d been unreasonable in my attack of the press release.
As for the book itself, I found it to be very valuable for small businesses, particularly newbies who’ve never done yellow pages advertising before. Even the business owner who thinks they already know it all ought to read this and check some of their assumptions. Read on for a further review of the book.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/19/2007
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Filed under: Advertising, Online Directories, Reference Material, Yellow Pages barry-maher, directory-advertising, Online Directories, small-business-advice, Yellow Pages, yellow-pages-advertising
New Domain Names for Brands - Very Limited
I saw this blog by Dennis Forbes which could be interesting for any of you who are planning to create a new brand name with associated domain name: The Search For A Domain Name.
If you’ve done any whois queries in hopes of setting up a new domain name, you’ll already know the frustration of being denied the names you’d like to have most. It leads one to wonder how many common names are already snapped up. Dennis has done a bit of interesting research presented in his article on some common name permutations, and what percentages are already registered or parked until someone pays fees to the companies which have speculated by snapping them up.
I’m betting that if he took a database of common dictionary names and ran similar analysis, he’d also find 100% of those already taken by the same speculators. Interesting reading, though.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/31/2006
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Filed under: General, Market Data, Reference Material, URLs
Bloody hell, that’s a lot of information
My feeling of technogeek euphoria that I got last month when Google doubled the size of their index has quickly evaporated as I perused Berkeley’s “How Much Information” study. Here’s some stats that will blow you away:
- The World Wide Web contains 167 terabytes of Web pages on its “surface” (i.e. fixed web pages); in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections. Plus another 91,850 terabytes of data in the “deep web” (from database driven websites that create web pages on demand)
- Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
- The amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.
- Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. Five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.
What I found even more amazing (and depressing) is the degree to which we consume this data. We are a society of
information junkies. Witness this from the same report:
Published studies on media use say that the average American adult uses the telephone 16.17 hours a month, listens to radio 90 hours a month, and watches TV 131 hours a month. About 53% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, averaging 25 hours and 25 minutes a month at home, and 74 hours and 26 minutes a month at work — about 13% of the time.
I can’t imagine sitting in front of the ‘idiot box’ for 131 hours a month. What a terrible waste of one’s life. For an average person, that’s something like 7 years of your life — gone.
Dave of the excellent PassingNotes.com blog looks at it this way:
IF you were all of those things, then of the 720 average hours in a given month, of which you should be sleeping circa 200 (give or take a few hundred), then you’d basically be occupied by media (in some form) for over 330 hours per month - and since we spend about one-third of our lives ‘waiting for something to happen’ (bus, phone etc) and about another 20-40 hours per month in a bathroom (much higher for ted kennedy), then discount sleep, and you’ve got about 80ish hours to be a genuine, sentient human being…sad, sad world…
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 12/13/2004
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Filed under: Reference Material, Spiders
MarketingProfs webcast on SEO
Well, I presented at another MarketingProfs webcast (webinar) today. This one was on Search Engine Optimization: Maximizing Your Natural Search Channel. Wow did we get deluged with questions at the end! Much more so than the one I did 2 months ago, on unlocking the power of Google as a research tool. I’ll try to respond to the raft of attendee questions and compile them all into a Q&A document for everyone’s enjoyment.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 11/18/2004
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Filed under: Reference Material
How to Become a Google Power Searcher
The first part of my MarketingProfs.com article series called “Unlocking Google’s Hidden Potential” is now available for MarketingProfs premium subscribers. The article provides tools to improving your Google search skills, including: word order, wildcards, Boolean logic, stemming, synonym searches, and much more.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 08/04/2004
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Filed under: Reference Material, Searching
