John Battelle's Searchblog


Wired 12.10: The Long Tail: More than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. "The biggest money is in the smallest sales." just as Batelle says about Google searches that there are more unique searches than there are of all the big common ones... Use recommendations to drive demand down the Long Tail. Netflix, where 60 percent of rentals come from recommendations, and Amazon do this with collaborative filtering, which uses the browsing and purchasing patterns of users to guide those who follow them ("Customers who bought this also bought ..."). This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare. And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit. -Chris Anderson is expanding this article into a book, due out in May 2006. Follow his continuing coverage of the subject on The Long Tail blog.