This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

[credit: Chris Anderson]On the left are the hits. There aren’t many of them, but they
each sell a lot. In fact, number one sells ten times as many copies as number ten, and
a hundred times as many as number one hundred. A hit is magical.
On the right are the rest. The long tail: good products of specialized
interest. Each, by itself, doesn’t sell many copies, but taken together, the
long tail sells as much as the short head.
Half of Amazon’s sales are books that are not in the top five thousand.
Half!
Half of the music consumed on streaming sites isn’t available in stores.
Not half the titles, half the volume.
Amazon can do great with this strategy since they sell all the available
books. Each author, though, is in pain: selling one or two books a day is no
way to make a living.
If you’re a musician, living on the long tail with your twelve or twenty-
four songs is not going to pay any bills. And almost everyone who
publishes to an open marketplace is on the long tail.
Below, you’ll see a similar graph showing traffic to websites.
If you’re at the circle, or worse, to the right of that circle, you can’t
compete for impact or ad dollars, because even though Google profits from
every website they search, most of the people out on the edges are huffing
and puffing.
These huge marketplaces (Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, etc.) depend on the
misguided hopes and dreams of individuals way out on the long tail.
Separately, each one struggles. Taken together, it’s a good business.

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Traffic to the most popular websites
The April Fools’ Passover Birthday Easter shirt
Here’s a vivid example of living on the long tail: The other day I saw a T-
shirt for sale on Amazon that said “It’s Easter, It’s Passover, It’s April
Fools’, and It’s My Birthday.”
That’s obviously a special-interest item, one that can’t possibly support
the effort that went into it. After all, only one in 365 people qualifies to
wear a shirt like that, and perhaps one in a thousand of those would actually
wear one, and, I don’t know, perhaps one in a hundred of their friends
would think to search for it, so the vendor probably sold four.
But there it was.
More searching found shirts like this one:

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Oh, I see. It’s a long-tail business. A few companies are making tens of
thousands of different shirts. They’re making them to order. The long tail
and the infinite shelf space of Amazon makes this possible. They might not
sell many (any) of any particular shirt, but taken together, it’s reasonable to
assume that they’re selling thousands of shirts a month.
If you can aggregate a chunk of the long tail, you can make a go of it.
But you can’t possibly sell just one obscure shirt and have a shot.
This is the false promise of the internet. That you can be happy with a
tiny slice of the long tail. That anyone can sing or write or dance or do
comedy or coach or freelance, and so anyone will, and so you’ll be fine.
Except you won’t be fine, because you can’t live on that. The internet
can live on that, Upwork and Fiverr and Netflix and Amazon can live on
that, but you can’t.
We hear about the outliers, the kids who make millions of dollars a year
with their YouTube channel or the fashionista with millions of followers.
But becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish.