Long Tail Gets Longer: What it Means for Mag. Circulation

The Harvard Business Review takes a look at how Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory is holding up online. In a nutshell, it’s perhaps longer (more titles) and flatter (making fewer sales) than originally thought. In fact:

In music, of the 2.4 million digital tracks sold in 2007 in the U.S. (most of them through iTunes) 24 percent sold only one copy and 91 percent sold fewer than 100 copies.

The paper suggests that blockbusters continue to rule on online sites (good for the blockbusters and the aggregators) and consumers have more choices (good for the consumers) but neither of these are leading to benefits for the producers of niche content (which is pretty much the same as B2B publishers).

It’s this reason that Nxtbook uses the Nxtstand - a newsstand designed to quickly get your niche customers over to your Web site. We simply don’t think there’s success to be found on aggregation sites. At least not for our customers.