Chris Anderson writes, The three main Long Tail business opportunities are:
- Long Tail aggregators (that include both the head and tail of content and products)
- Niche suppliers/producers (who get aggregated by someone else)
- Filters (which help people find what they want)
Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, fall into the first of these categories, aggregation. The Long Tail is all about the shift from hits to niches. But aren't all those aggregators "hits"? They're not only the largest players in their category, but they seem to be getting even larger, gaining market share at the expense of their competitors. Raising the question - would this become a case of winner getting all in the mdium to long term?,Chris anderson points out that's certainly the way it looks now, but it won't last, or at least won't last as it is and provides google as the example
Google is a classic Long Tail aggregator, one that uses great filtering (its PageRank algorithms) to improve the s/n ratio of the tail. They aggregate the tail of information, the tail of advertisers and the tail of publishers. Taking Google as the example Chris ex[lains that the rise of the "vertical search" market is simply a case of slicing aggregation into niches, optimized for different needs. In fact,Google itself is already doing this, with Google Local, Google Scholar, Google Maps, Froogle, Google News, Google Print, and so on. Each has a specialized presentation and pulls from a subset of the information universe that gives more appropriate and useful results in that domain. Right now that's Google fine-slicing its own aggregation. An important post in the evolution of Longtail discussions.
Category :Long Tail
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