Posts tagged long tail

28 March 2010
at 8:57 am

Microsoft Ignored the Long Tail in Search, Bing Boss Says

Microsoft fell so far behind Google in the search engine market because it failed to retrieve relevant results for a long line of less popular queries, a senior Microsoft executive told the crowd at the Search Engine Strategies show here March 25.

Such was the key reason Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience Group for Microsoft Bing, offered for why Google is light-years ahead of Microsoft in the search market. Google commands 65 percent of the U.S. share search market, compared with 11.5 percent for Microsoft Bing.

Mehdi, responding to a keynote host’s observation that Microsoft was late to the Internet and search, said, “We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail. We actually focused a lot on the head of the queries. … It turned out the long tail was much more important.”

» via eWeek

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z search
z search engines
z bing
z microsoft
z long tail

23 February 2010
at 12:54 pm

Scholarly Communications in the Long Tail of Knowledge

Of course, digital formats won’t solve every problem, but as online journals discover they are not bound by many of the limits of print, they will better service the Long Tail of knowledge by giving unlimited life to works of limited interest. That is one of the great features of the Long Tail. In academic terms, publishing and archiving become increasingly the same enterprise. Ideally, all that is published becomes widely and permanently available, ready to be found by readers well outside the minor set of fellow specialists who are contemporary with the author. What’s more, the Long Tail is a kind of faith in the inherent interest of knowledge. It turns out that if there is broad and easy access to scholarship, most works end up attracting more interested readers than first supposed. This fact is born out by the success of institutional repositories now adding legacy scholarship to their archives. To their surprise, these old but newly exposed studies are being consulted and downloaded far more often than ever anticipated. If you publish it right (through standards compliance), the readers will come. They are already there.

» via Academic Evolution

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z long tail
z scholarly communication
z higher education
z publishing
z journals

21 November 2009
at 11:31 am

Tracking the Hits Along the Musical The Long Tail For most people, Chris Anderson’s 2006 book The Long Tail marked a new way of thinking about selling goods on the Internet. Being free of the physical limits of shelf space, he predicted, would alter what people bought. For music, this would mean the most popular music titles would become less popular as consumers were able to tap into vast online catalogs. In most corners of the business world, and especially in the music industry, The Long Tail was controversial. Would consumers actually start to ignore the hits? A Billboard analysis of Nielsen SoundScan data going back to 2004 shows Anderson wasn’t correct on all points. Hit digital albums have lost market share to far less popular titles. But hit digital tracks have gained market share over the years. The top 200 tracks accounted for 14.5% of sales in 2004 and rose to 15.8% in 2005, 17.1% in 2006 and 2007 and 17.2% in 2008. Through October 25, 2009, the top 200 tracks’ share stood at 18.7%. Seen at nielsenwire

Tracking the Hits Along the Musical The Long Tail

For most people, Chris Anderson’s 2006 book The Long Tail marked a new way of thinking about selling goods on the Internet. Being free of the physical limits of shelf space, he predicted, would alter what people bought. For music, this would mean the most popular music titles would become less popular as consumers were able to tap into vast online catalogs. In most corners of the business world, and especially in the music industry, The Long Tail was controversial. Would consumers actually start to ignore the hits?

A Billboard analysis of Nielsen SoundScan data going back to 2004 shows Anderson wasn’t correct on all points. Hit digital albums have lost market share to far less popular titles. But hit digital tracks have gained market share over the years. The top 200 tracks accounted for 14.5% of sales in 2004 and rose to 15.8% in 2005, 17.1% in 2006 and 2007 and 17.2% in 2008. Through October 25, 2009, the top 200 tracks’ share stood at 18.7%.

Seen at nielsenwire

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z music
z long tail
z business
z internet

4 November 2009
at 6:31 pm

How a blog, a camera, and a court are feeding journalism’s long tail When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that only appeals to a few hundred people — to live online with few concerns about space or scarcity. Toss in search engines and dead-simple publishing tools and you’ve got a bounty of easy-to-find, niche-friendly content. Whether intended or not, Ron Sylvester is stocking the long tail. The veteran crime and courts reporter for The Wichita Eagle uses his blog What the Judge Ate for Breakfast to publish two-minute videos that dive into the intricacies of a courthouse. They’re fascinating clips, touching on everything from the role of prosecutors, to odd defendant behavior, to the less glamorous responsibilities judges assume. These glimpses into the life of a court are classic examples of long tail content: the type of stuff that would never see the light of day on traditional platforms. It makes sense that something like this would come from Sylvester. He was one of the first beat reporters to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting updates from the courtroom. The positive response to the Twitter coverage encouraged him, and he started looking at different techniques for covering his beat. “There’s so much human drama in the courthouse,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to expand the coverage and use multimedia to do that.” Seen at Nieman Journalism Lab

How a blog, a camera, and a court are feeding journalism’s long tail

When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that only appeals to a few hundred people — to live online with few concerns about space or scarcity. Toss in search engines and dead-simple publishing tools and you’ve got a bounty of easy-to-find, niche-friendly content.

Whether intended or not, Ron Sylvester is stocking the long tail. The veteran crime and courts reporter for The Wichita Eagle uses his blog What the Judge Ate for Breakfast to publish two-minute videos that dive into the intricacies of a courthouse. They’re fascinating clips, touching on everything from the role of prosecutors, to odd defendant behavior, to the less glamorous responsibilities judges assume. These glimpses into the life of a court are classic examples of long tail content: the type of stuff that would never see the light of day on traditional platforms.

It makes sense that something like this would come from Sylvester. He was one of the first beat reporters to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting updates from the courtroom. The positive response to the Twitter coverage encouraged him, and he started looking at different techniques for covering his beat. “There’s so much human drama in the courthouse,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to expand the coverage and use multimedia to do that.”

Seen at Nieman Journalism Lab

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z blogging
z internet
z journalism
z multimedia
z long tail

25 September 2009
at 8:57 am

Netflix data shows shifting demand down the Long Tail The vertical axis is percentage of total demand (with ratings used as a rough estimate of rentals), and the horizontal axis is the popularity rank of the DVD titles. Between 2000 and 2005, the Netflix selection grew from 4,500 DVDs to 18,000, and the effect on the demand of this increase in variety is shown above. Seen at The Long Tail

Netflix data shows shifting demand down the Long Tail

The vertical axis is percentage of total demand (with ratings used as a rough estimate of rentals), and the horizontal axis is the popularity rank of the DVD titles. Between 2000 and 2005, the Netflix selection grew from 4,500 DVDs to 18,000, and the effect on the demand of this increase in variety is shown above.

Seen at The Long Tail

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z long tail
z netflix
z markets