Tito's Blog

Percentage distribution vs absolute numbers in the Long Tail

Just read an article on Times Online about yet another study confirming that in our digital age it is still true that 20% of best seller items represent 80% or more of total sales: Long Tail theory contradicted as study reveals 10m digital music tracks unsold

Anderson’s Long Tail theory is all about absolute numbers, not percentage distributions: it’s not about 80/20 Pareto distributions getting fatter, but about millions of items on the virtual shelf (e.g. 13 million tracks available online), millions of SKUs sold (e.g. 3 million tracks actually sold, as opposed to a few thousand in a brick & mortar world) and a mindblowing supply of content to filter (e.g. less than 25% of available tracks worth buying).