Long Tail – From the tail to the head

Panos Kontopoulos - 09/11/07

I had this discussion the other day with Nikos while we were @OpenCoffee about how all these new popular online services like twitter earn their money. Of course one of the possible answers is that they just wait until somebody acquires them, obtaining a – hopefully – huge audience that is using the service and trying to solve the same monetization problem afterwards. However there might be a different answer which has to do with my favorite Long Tail effect.

Most of the times all these startups start offering free online services like video sharing, photos sharing, thoughts sharing, friends sharing etc. That means that many people are using the service, in most of the cases quite limited, few videos, tens of photos, a handful of friends. Of course there are cases where the service is used more heavily. But at the end, the average usage is quite low.

lt1The tail of the service has just started to get formed.

And then … some of these existing or new heavy users start demanding more of the service: larger storage space, better performance, more features.

And this is the time when the head of the tail gets formed.

lt3

And it’s this head that drives the service its next step forward. Without forgetting the tail users who are still happily using a viable service, getting all new features – in limited versions – for free.

So far we had services start living from the head to the tail.

Now it’s the time to start thinking the other way round.

From the tail right to the head!


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  1. Interesting way of reversing the Long Tail idea but I think the whole over rated Long tail philosophy needs an overhaul. http://www.alexanderchalkidis.com/dotnet/www.alexanderchalkidis.com/blog/post/2009/11/The-Long-Tail-myth-and-why-it-caught-on-so-well.html

    Which is why even the author of the theory has moved on to emphasizing “free” now and downplays long tail in its practical effects in business.

    Comment by Alexander Chalkidis — May 17, 2010 #

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