The Long Curve

Some years ago I went to a lecturer by Jacob Nielsen where I began to get very excited when he talked about the distribution of visits to web sites following Zipf’s Law. Putting it very crudely Zipf’s Law states that with things like words in a language or the popularity of web sites there will a small number that are used a lot, a mid-range that will be used a bit and a very large number that will used hardly at all. If you represent this as a diagram you have a very steep gradient on the left, gently tapering off as you move to the right. (There is a very nice example of this here) What excited me about Nielsen’s talk was his suggestion that it was in the more gentle part of the curve that the richest new commercial possibilities lay.
I was reminded of my original excitement when I read Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” in Wired. There is a lot of fascinating stuff here, including the diagram I’ve already mentioned that explains all the key stuff in one picture, but this extract may explain why I am bouncing up and down on my chair, mumbling, “the internet really does make a difference”.
“Chart Rhapsody’s monthly statistics and you get a “power law” demand curve that looks much like any record store’s, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero – either they don’t carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.
The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.”