The Web vs The Long Tail

Chris Anderson has argued that the web is moving us away from mainstream products and towards the "long tail," the vast number of obscure products on the web. A recent study comes to a different conclusion:In a recent study Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school, looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink.Anderson's response: ...there is a subtle difference in the way we define the Long Tail, especially in the definitions of "head" and "tail", that leads to very different results.The best example of this is in... [read full story]