MEDIA IN THE ONLINE AGEAPPLYING THEORY

OCR A2 MEDIA

RECAP Online media… What is it?

Online media… where did it begin?

Example of online production

Example of online distribution

Example of online consumption

THE LONG TAIL THEORY What did we discover?

WHAT IS THE LONG TAIL? Long tail theory is named as a reference to

the tail of a demand curve. The term has since been rederived from an XY graph that is created when charting product popularity to total product inventory.

The Long Tail theory suggests that a small number of products (best-selling books, hit songs, etc) dominate the market. That’s the ‘head.’ Retailers profit from selling a large number of these relatively few products by selling them at a premium.

THE HEAD Open any online media site, the opening

page will be a sea of these products.

Can you think of any examples?

THE LONG TAIL The rest of the products in the market (b-sides, live

or unreleased tracks, niche products) make up the ‘long tail.’

If the cost of manufacturing and distribution is low enough, these products can actually be more profitable than the hit’s by selling fewer copies of a larger number of products.

At least that’s what the theory suggests. Retailers like Amazon.com have built empires on this concept.

A huge portion of their sales come from obscure titles that you can’t find in physical, brick and mortar book or record stores.

WHAT EFFECT DOES THIS HAVE FOR MEDIA PRODUCERS? The implications of this for the independent music

industry are huge. With the advent of digital technology, the cost of manufacturing and distributing music has been reduced to practically zero.

That means that online retailers can offer tracks that brick and mortar stores could never afford to offer, such as obscure indie bands with no big label push behind them.

More importantly, that means that those retailers can actually make a profit by doing so. For the first time in the history of music, it may actually make business sense for retailers to carry indie music!

Can anyone give examples?

KEY THEORISTS Use of the phrase the long tail in business as "the

notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market" of consumers was first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004.

The concept drew in part from a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”.

This noted that, “a relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but "the long tail" of millions of weblogs may have only a handful of links going into them.”

Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models beginning with a series of speeches in early 2004 and with the publication of a Wired magazine article in October 2004. Anderson later extended it into the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006).

ANDERSON’S THEORY Anderson argues that products in low demand or that

have a low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, that showed that a significant portion of Amazon.com's sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores. The long tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap that market successfully.

An Amazon employee described the long tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."

QUICK TASK

Fill in your long tail sheet.

Label the ‘Short head’.

Label the ‘long tail’.

Use an example online retailer or distributer.

Give example Short head products/artists/stories

Give example Long tail products/artists/stories

OPEN YOUR ESSAY PLAN SHEETS.

Go to Section 3: Theory: Long Tail.

Now fill in these boxes.

How would long tail theory inform your essay. Make sure you include the key theorist: Chris Anderson 2004.

Try to think of examples for both news & music!

SUMMARISE THE THEORY On your A2 Sheets in your pairs work on

including Long tail theory in your essay.

Try not to just shoehorn it in!

It should form a cohesive section of your argument and reinforce your argument.

WIKINOMICS Recap ready to report back next week!