Blockbusters stomp on the long tail, Harvard study finds
Posted by: admin in Business and Politics
Remember the long tail? It was the omnipresent theory that recommended there were oodles of cash to be made by monetizing a market’s disparate tastes via the Web.
Why sell a million duplicates of Led Zeppelin’s Coda, when you can make a thriving business of selling two to three copies of your neighbor’s garage band to Rick, two duplicates of a Nigerian band’s tunes to Susan, and so on?
As new research highlighted in Harvard Business Review suggests, the answer might well be that the real money is in the blockbuster, not the long tail, after all:
Meanwhile, our research also showed that success is concentrated in ever fewer best-selling titles at the head of the distribution curve. From 2000 to 2005 the number of titles in the top 10 percent of weekly sales dropped by more than 50 percent–an increase in concentration that’s common in winner-take-all markets. The importance of individual ideal sellers is not diminishing over time. It is growing….
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