the_long_tail长尾理论.doc

C长尾理论（The Long Tail）是网络时代兴起的一种新理论，由美国人克里斯安德森提出。长尾理论认为，由于成本和效率的因素，当商品储存流通展示的场地和渠道足够宽广，商品生产成本急剧下降以至于个人都可以进行生产，并且商品的销售成本急剧降低时，几乎任何以前看似需求极低的产品，只要有卖，都会有人买。这些需求和销量不高的产品所占据的共同市场份额，可以和主流产品的市场份额 相比，甚至更大。根据维基百科，长尾（The Long Tail）这一概念是由连线杂志主编Chris Anderson在2004年十月的“长尾” 一文中最早提出，用来描述诸如亚马逊和Netflix之类网站的商业和经济模式。 “长尾”实际上是统计学中幂律（Power Laws）和帕累托分布（Pareto distributions）特征的一个口语化表达。 过去人们只能关注重要的人或重要的事，如果用正态分布曲线来描绘这些人或事，人们只能关注曲线的“头部”，而将处于曲线“尾部”、需要更多的精力和成本才能关注到的大多数人或事忽略。例如，在销售产品时，厂商关注的是少数几个所谓“VIP”客户，“无暇”顾及在人数上居于大多数的普通消费者。而在网络时代，由于关注的成本大大降低，人们有可能以很低的成本关注正态分布曲线的“尾部”，关注“尾部”产生的总体效益甚至会超过“头部”。例如，某著名网站是世界上最大的网络广告商，它没有一个大客户，收入完全来自被其他广告商忽略的中小企业。安德森认为，网络时代是关注“长尾”、发挥“长尾”效益的时代。 举例来说，我们常用的汉字实际上不多，但因出现频次高，所以这些为数不多的汉字占据了右图广大 长尾理论的红区；绝大部分的汉字难得一用，它们就属于那长长的蓝尾。 Chris认为，只要存储和流通的渠道足够大，需求不旺或销量不佳的产品共同占据的市场份额就可以和那些数量不多的热卖品所占据的市场份额相匹敌甚至更大。 长尾市场也称之为“利基市场”。“利基”一词是英文“Niche” 的音译，意译为“壁龛”，有拾遗补缺或见缝插针的意思。菲利普科特勒在营销管理中给利基下的定义为：利基是更窄地确定某些群体，这是一个小市场并且它的需要没有被服务好，或者说“有获取利益的基础”。 通过对市场的细分，企业集中力量于某个特定的目标市场，或严格针对一个细分市场，或重点经营一个产品和服务，创造出产品和服务优势。 编辑本段内涵简单的说，所谓长尾理论是指，商业和文化的未来不在于传统需求曲线上那个代表“畅销商品”的头部；而是那条代表“冷门商品”经常为人遗忘的长尾。举例来说，一家大型书店通常可摆放10万本书，但亚马逊网络书店的图书销售额中，有四分之一来自排名10万以后的书籍。这些“冷门”书籍的销售比例正以高速成长，预估未来可占整个书市的一半。这意味着消费者在面对无限的选择时，真正想要的东西、和想要取得的渠道都出现了重大的变化，一套崭新的商业模式也跟着崛起。简而言之，长尾所涉及的冷门产品涵盖了几乎更多人的需求，当有了需求后，会有更多的人意识到这种需求，从而使冷门不再冷门。 编辑本段发现克里斯安德森，美国连线杂志主编，喜欢从数字中发现趋势。一次跟eCast首席执行官范阿迪布的会面，后者提出一个让安德森耳目一新的“98法则”，改变了他的研究方向。范阿迪布从数字音乐点唱数字统计中发现了一个秘密：听众对98的非热门音乐有着无限的需求，非热门的音乐集合市场无比巨大，无边无际。听众几乎盯着所有的东西！他把这称为“98法则”。 安德森意识到阿迪布那个有悖常识的“98法则”，隐含着一个强大的真理。于是，他系统研究了亚马逊、狂想曲公司、Blog、Google、eBay、Netflix等互联网零售商的销售数据，并与沃尔玛等传统零售商的销售数据进行了对比，观察到一种符合统计规律（大数定律）的现象。这种现象恰如以数量、品种二维坐标上的一条需求曲线，拖着长长的尾巴，向代表“品种”的横轴尽头延伸，长尾由此得名。 长尾（long tail）在2004年10月号连线发表后，迅速成了这家杂志历史上被引用最多的一篇文章。特别是经过吸纳无边界智慧的博客平台，不断丰富着新的素材和案例。安德森沉浸其中不能自拔，终于打造出一本影响商业世界的畅销书长尾理论。 编辑本段案例Google adwords、Amazon、Itune都是长尾理论的优秀案例。 1、 Google是一个最典型的“长尾”公司，其成长历程就是把广告商和出版商的“长尾”商业化的过 长尾理论程。以占据了Google半壁江山的AdSense为例，它面向的客户是数以百万计的中小型网站和个人对于普通的媒体和广告商而言，这个群体的价值微小得简直不值一提，但是Google通过为其提供个性化定制的广告服务，将这些数量众多的群体汇集起来，形成了非常可观的经济利润。目前，Google的市值已超过800亿美元，被认为是“最有价值的媒体公司”，远远超过了那些传统的老牌传媒。 2、长尾理论在中国最好的一个制造企业的例子就是中电电气集团，从2001年开始，中电电气将市场定位在“客户需求”这一“长尾”上，它连续推出多款适合不同环境使用的产品，如：国内第一台绿色变压器、解决迎峰度夏难题的城网专用耐高温液浸变压器、矿用隔爆变压器、油田冶金行业专用半包封干式变压器“逼”着多家厂商同样进入了这一阵容。同时，他们开展立体式的市场活动，在各地设立办事处，点对点的销售，针对不同的客户开展产品推广会，以点代面。根据不同客户需求开发研制符合市场的新型产品，带动变压器产业的升级，这些意识和能力在当时制造企业而言是很稀奇的。而中电电气在这一过程中则迅速起身，成为变压器行业的领军企业。 编辑本段与二八定律“长尾理论”被认为是对传统的“二八定律”的彻底叛逆。 尽管听上去有些学术的味道，但事实上这不难理解人类一直在用二八定律来界定主流，计算投入和产出的效率。它贯穿了整个生活和商业社会。这是1897年意大利经济学家帕累托归纳出的一个统计结论，即20%的人口享有80%的财富。当然，这并不是一个准确的比例数字，但表现了一种不平衡关系，即少数主流的人（或事物）可以造成主要的、重大的影响。以至于在市场营销中，为了提高效率，厂商们习惯于把精力放在那些有80%客户去购买的20%的主流商品上，着力维护购买其80%商品的20%的主流客户。 在上述理论中被忽略不计的80%就是长尾。Chris Anderson说：“我们一直在忍受这些最小公分母的专制统治我们的思维被阻塞在由主流需求驱动的经济模式下。”但是人们看到，在互联网的促力下，被奉为传统商业圣经的“二八定律”开始有了被改变的可能性。这一点在媒体和娱乐业尤为明显，经济驱动模式呈现从主流市场向非主流市场转变的趋势。 长尾理论无处不在？长尾理论的应用决不止于互联网以及娱乐媒体产业。 传统的市场曲线是符合80/20铁律的，为了抢夺那带来80% 利润的畅销品市场，我们厮杀得天昏地暗，但是我们所谓的热门商品正越来越名不副实，比如说黄金电视节目的收视率几十年来一直在萎缩，若放在1970年，现在的一档最佳节目恐怕连前10名之列都难以进入。简言之，尽管我们仍然对大热门着迷，但它们的经济力量已经今非昔比。那么，那些反复无常的消费者们已经转向了什么地方？答案并非唯一。他们散向了四面八方，因为市场已经分化成了无数不同的领域。互联网的出现改变了这种局面，使得99%的商品都有机会进行销售，市场曲线中那条长长的尾部（所谓的利基产品）也咸鱼翻身，成为我们可以寄予厚望的新的利润增长点。 长尾理论请看这张统计，横轴是品种，纵轴是销量。典型的情况是只有少数产品销量较高，其余多数产品销量很低。传统的二八定律（或称20/80定律）关注其中红色部分，认为20%的品种带来了80%的销量，所以应该只保留这部分，其余的都应舍弃。长尾理论则关注蓝色的长尾巴，认为这部分积少成多，可以积累成足够大、甚至超过红色部分的市场份额。但也有很多失败者并没有真正理解长尾理论的实现条件。 首先，长尾理论统计的是销量，并非利润。管理成本是其中最关键的因素。销售每件产品需要一定的成本，增加品种所带来的成本也要分摊。所以，每个品种的利润与销量成正比，当销量低到一个限度就会亏损。理智的零售商是不会销售引起亏损的商品。这就是二八定律的基础。 超市是通过降低单品销售成本，从而降低每个品种的止亏销量，扩大销售品种。为了吸引顾客和营造货品齐全的形象，超市甚至可以承受亏损销售一些商品。但迫于仓储、配送的成本，超市的承受能力是有限的。 互联网企业可以进一步降低单品销售成本，甚至没有真正的库存，而网站流量和维护费用远比传统店面低，所以能够极大地扩大销售品种。比如Amazon就是如此。而且，互联网经济有赢者独占的特点，所以网站在前期可以不计成本、疯狂投入，这更加剧了品种的扩张。 如果互联网企业销售的是虚拟产品，则支付和配送成本几乎为0，可以把长尾理论发挥到极致。Google adwords、Itune音乐下载都属于这种情况。可以说，虚拟产品销售天生就适合长尾理论。 其次，要使长尾理论更有效，应该尽量增大尾巴。也就是降低门槛，制造小额消费者。不同于传统商业的拿大单、传统互联网企业的会员费，互联网营销应该把注意力放在把蛋糕做大。通过鼓励用户尝试，将众多可以忽略不计的零散流量，汇集成巨大的商业价值。 Google adsense就是这样一个蛋糕制造机。之前，普通个人网站几乎没有盈利机会。Adsense通过在小网站上发布相关广告，带给站长们一种全新的低门槛的盈利渠道。同时，把众多小网站的流量汇集成为统一的广告媒体。 当然，在这里还有一个降低管理成本的问题。如果处理不好，客服成本会迅速上升，成为主要矛盾。Google是通过算法降低人工管理工作量，但也仅仅做到差强人意。 使用长尾理论必须小心翼翼，保证任何一项成本都不随销量的增加而激增，最差也是同比增长。否则，就会走入死路。最理想的长尾商业模式是，成本是定值，而销量可以无限增长。这就需要可以低成本扩展的基础设施，Google的bigTable就是如此。Chris is expanding this article into a book, due out in May 2006. Follow his continuing coverage of the subject on The Long Tail blog.In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.What happened? In short, A recommendations. The online booksellers software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.Particularly notable is that when Krakauers book hit shelves, Simpsons was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpsons book - and if they had, they wouldnt have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past whats available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from todays mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.For too long weve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.The main problem, if thats the word, is that we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too. But that world puts two dramatic limitations on our entertainment.The first is the need to find local audiences. An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; thats essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; thats the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.In each case, retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population - perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops. Its not enough for a great documentary to have a potential national audience of half a million; what matters is how many it has in the northern part of Rockville, Maryland, and among the mall shoppers of Walnut Creek, California.There is plenty of great entertainment with potentially large, even rapturous, national audiences that cannot clear that bar. For instance, The Triplets of Belleville, a critically acclaimed film that was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar this year, opened on just six screens nationwide. An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, Indias film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazons Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.The other constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming. The curse of broadcast technologies is that they are profligate users of limited resources. The result is yet another instance of having to aggregate large audiences in one geographic area - another high bar, above which only a fraction of potential content rises.The past century of entertainment has offered an easy solution to these constraints. Hits fill theaters, fly off shelves, and keep listeners and viewers from touching their dials and remotes. Nothing wrong with that; indeed, sociologists will tell you that hits are hardwired into human psychology, the combinatorial effect of conformity and word of mouth. And to be sure, a healthy share of hits earn their place: Great songs, movies, and books attract big, broad audiences.But most of us want more than just hits. Everyones taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more were drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternatives have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them.Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.To see how, meet Robbie Vann-Adib鬠the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks - and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: Weve been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Paretos principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books - 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.But the right answer, says Vann-Adib鬠is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.People get Vann-Adib駳 question wrong because the answer is counterintuitive in two ways. The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. Were stuck in a hit-driven mindset - we think that if something isnt a hit, it wont make money and so wont return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adib鬠like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the misses usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.The second reason for the wrong answer is that the industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want. We assume, for instance, that there is little demand for the stuff that isnt carried by Wal-Mart and other major retailers; if people wanted it, surely it would be sold. The rest, the bottom 80 percent, must be subcommercial at best.But as egalitarian as Wal-Mart may seem, it is actually extraordinarily elitist. Wal-Mart must sell at least 100,000 copies of a CD to cover its retail overhead and make a sufficient profit; less than 1 percent of CDs do that kind of volume. What about the 60,000 people who would like to buy the latest Fountains of Wayne or Crystal Method album, or any other nonmainstream fare? They have to go somewhere else. Bookstores, the megaplex, radio, and network TV can be equally demanding. We equate mass market with quality and demand, when in fact it often just represents familiarity, savvy advertising, and broad if somewhat shallow appeal. What do we really want? Were only just discovering, but it clearly starts with more.To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.Chart Rhapsodys monthly statistics and you get a power law demand curve that looks much like any record stores, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they dont carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsodys top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if its just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.This is the Long Tail.You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. Theres the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to 80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which dont have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.Oh sure, theres also a lot of crap. But theres a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically wont steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.Whats really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and youve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazons book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see Anatomy of the Long Tail). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: The biggest money is in the smallest sales.The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals