Google: Going After The Long Tail

Chris Anderson has been famous for his long tail. Well, Chris does not really have a tail [:))], but he was first to notice the Internet phenomena, he called The Long Tail. The Long Tail Theory is really simple. Before the Internet we used to live in the hits economy. Pareto rule was everywhere. 80:20. Pick the 20 percent of hits that generate 80 percent of your income. From Wal-Mart to Hollywood and music producers, everybody obeyed the rule. The reason was simple - costs generated by manufacturing, storage and distribution. So if something was not a hit (it did not sell, and did not sell quickly), the costs generated by simply storing something on a shelf killed any potential profits. So every business was going after the hits. Things that were selling quickly and thus the storage cost per item was kept at the minimum possible level. And all this was about to change...

With the proliferation of the Internet we have gone from atoms to bits. Take music for example. What is music? Is it matter (atoms) or information (bits)? Well... music _IS_ just bits, but they have to be materialized somehow. To buy a song before, you had to go to a music store and pick a physical Compact Disc. The disc was the physical medium, made of atoms, where the music bits were materialized and stored. And being atomic, the disc had material properties like dimensions and weight. Does music have dimensions and weight? No... So with the advent of electronic means of storing and distributing the bits, we have finally been able to free ourselves from the physics. An example. There is an artist, he records a song. To make his living he wants to sell the song. What should he to do? Burn it on a CD. One? Two? A thousand? OK... as many as there are potential buyers. But where are they? London, Paris, New York, Tokyo? So how many CDs do we need? A couple of thousand perhaps. That will cost... too much for most of the artists out there. Now forget the atoms. Make a web page. Make the song available for downloading. The cost for storage and distribution? 20 dollars a month? Potential audience? The World! No Pareto constraints. Never again...

Now what has Google to do with The Long Tail? There are three ingredients that combined, are going to make the Google Dynamite: Google Base, Google Purchases and Google AdWords. The Base is where you store what you want to sell (things like music, podcasts, articles... you name it). Purchases is how you get paid for what you sell (an account connected to your credit card, where you will get credits once people start buying). And AdWords is how you announce what you have to the World. When the three are integrated together, the Long Tail Google Dynamite will explode. It will be the easiest way to earn money for anything that you can offer and others will find useful. Regardless of geo location, directed to your offerings by means of highly targeted ads, and available for purchase with just one click. Thanks to Google, The Long Tail will finally take over the hits economy.

I will be selling my weekly blog posts there :) Any buyers?