The concept of the long tail has many links with the ideas behind wikinomics and mass collaboration. However, throughout my ongoing research, I’ve started to question whether the long tail is actually as important to the future of certain businesses as many people now commonly believe. One that I’ve been particularly focused on is YouTube – the platform that asks you to Broadcast Yourself, and a site that has so many videos that one would think that the Long Tail might dominate. But based on what the data is telling me, this perception may be off – and YouTube might have a lot more of the “blockbuster” model characteristics than many people think.
As I thought about this, my emerging hypothesis was that the way data is being commonly presented in relation to the long tail – in graph form – is often very misleading. For example, take a look at the following two charts – a traditional “Long Tail” graphic, and an index of the views a new video posted on YouTube can expect to receive in the first month (from viral manager).
At first glance, you might argue that YouTube video views certainly have long tail characteristics – and you might even argue that the tail looks FAR “thicker” than in the first diagram, so it might be even more important. However, look at the scale on the Y-axis. It’s not proportional. In “equal steps”, it goes from 1 to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000 to 1,000,000 to 10,ooo,ooo. In turn, it doesn’t really provide an accurate visualization of the reality of video views distribution.
So why do they do it that way? The simple answer is probably that it’s the only way to fit it on a screen. As it’s currently presented, the space from “1 to 10″ is about one centimeter. If I wanted to make an accurate visual that goes up to 10,000,000, I would need a Y axis that is about 1,000,000 centimeters long. Or 10,000 meters. Or 10 kilometers. Very few video screens that could contain that. So if I increase the scale to fit a one meter long screen (which is pretty big), 10 video views would be represented by 1/1000th of a centimeter, and 100 video views would be represented by 1/100th of a centimeter. In other words, the entire long tail would basically be invisible.
So why does this matter? Well let’s look at it another way. To make the math simpler, assume for a second there were exactly 100 videos uploaded to YouTube. The bottom 50 would be viewed, on average, about 40 times each (roughly) according to the graphic. That amounts to a total of 2,000 views. The top video would be viewed at least 500,000 times. In turn, that one most popular video is seen a few hundred times more than the bottom 50 combined. By extension, the top 1% of videos are viewed a few hundred times more often than the bottom 50% combined.
So do you see what I’m saying? Looked at in this light, the bottom part of the long tail doesn’t really seem THAT important on YouTube – the top 1% absolutely dominates it. And even if you extend the analysis out to look at the issue from the 80/20 rule, the story doesn’t change that much – the video right at the 20% cut-off receives about 500 views, so using the same “100 total videos” approach the bottom 80% would received (approximately) a little under 10,000 views combined – about 50 times less than the top video alone.
So am I missing something here, or is the long tail not really that important for YouTube? It sure looks like a blockbuster model to me…
{ 2 trackbacks }