A grand day for my archives

I’ve occupied this corner of the internet, or one very much like it, for quite a while now. And it’s always surprised me which posts get traffic and which ones don’t. I’ve just had a fun moment looking at my all time stats (well, for as long as I’ve had google analytics installed).

This is fun – to this date my most controversial post “Five things that would make atheists seem nicer” has been my most read post of all time. It got hammered in three days, and took down my server. This week sometime that post will be eclipsed by my “longest tail” post  – “How to make Sizzler’s cheese toast.” This is pretty satisfying to me. You should be part of getting it over the line (especially now that it has just been updated with a slight change to the recipe secured via the Sizzler website).

That is all.

August 23, 2012

In Consciousness

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Comments

AndrewF says:
August 23, 2012 at 9:19 pm

What is a ‘longest tail’ post?

Nathan Campbell says:
August 24, 2012 at 12:21 pm

Read this article from Wired.

Nathan Campbell says:
August 24, 2012 at 12:24 pm

A bit of a highlight from the article:

What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail”). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.”

The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger.

When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well – niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.