Lecture 10: The Essence of having a long tail

Of late, the term or phrase that’s seeking quite the attention is ‘long tail’. For those, who aren’t familiar with this phrase, it might sound like something that is never ending or something that’s longer than usual. Well, that could probably be another way of looking at it. What ‘long tail’ actually means is having not just the most popular ones, but also the ‘forgotten’ ones. This could be applied to any context. But, this is the concept or idea that’s been the root cause of some great success stories.

Let us consider Amazon for example. All of us know that it has a wide range of products and it caters to different sections of web users. But, one of the most significant factors for its huge success is – having a long tail! It should be noted that all the products that are offered by Amazon have long shelf lives and so Amazon is able to market those products at different times which includes times when the product is considered to be dead in the market.

It would probably be easier to understand with a real-world example. So, here comes one:

I guess everyone would know the latest Vidya Balan blockbuster “Dirty Picture”. It is based on a biography of a famous South Indian actress, Silk Smitha. When Dirty Picture released in 2011, it turned out to be a massive hit in North India and people started flocking the movie theatres. Stories and rumors about the actress started making rounds all across North India. What Amazon does is, it senses this big opportunity and starts recommending the old movies of 1970s and 1980s starring Silk Smitha, on its website. When people see those movies on the site, they tend to purchase them too, along with the new one. This is a simple concept that has resulted in a huge success. This was possible only because Amazon had not just the latest hits, but also the old forgotten ones. Now you would realize how useful it is to have long shelf life for the products and how valuable it is to have the ‘forgotten’ ones.

As I already mentioned, this concept of long tail could well be applied for different fields. In the context of Google Ads, it would be really helpful to have the ‘forgotten’ keywords or the most rarely used (specific) keywords as a part of your ad campaign. But, it is to be noted that having just one keyword of this type, wouldn’t bring about a significant difference. Whereas, having a handful of them, would prove to be prosperous.