Just to clear things, it is not actually a “long tale” that I will be talking about.
In this week’s lecture, we learnt about the long tail effect and the attention economy. The long tail is defined as “a strategy that allows businesses to realize significant profit out of selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items.” (Anderson, 2004)
Within the idea of the long tail concept, comes something intriguing. The Hit Driven model or culture comes to mind, which basically limits the scale, cost of entry and where there is a risk to take away the business model where the lowest denominator always wins. This may sound a little confusing but here is a little example.
In the lecture, the lecturer gave the example of two movies: Annie Hall and Transformers. In terms of the hit driven culture, Transformers will always be more successful as compared to Annie Hall. Transformers will have more profit and more viewers as Annie Hall is more focused on a niche market rather than in an international aspect.
The information economy. We live in an era where information can be crossed the material barriers of the world in the speed of light, just through something called the internet. On top of that, this is all free. Since the internet is basically run by a river of copies and they are free, how do people earn money from this?
Many factors can come in to play when answering this question. Being “first in line” when trying to sell a product will probably give you the opportunity to increase the value of it. Another factor could be making the copy have a little extra touch, making it more customized when compared to others. Even adding the creator’s autograph is a great way to differentiate yours from others.
Pretty sure if I add my signature to my products, it will cost way more than any product (sarcasm intended).
References
- I. (Ed.). (n.d.). Long Tail.What Is the ‘Long Tail’. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long-tail.asp.
The Erryl Classicz 