The Long Tail and making Money

The whole idea of the long tail is crucial to bloggers who are hoping that by generating good content, over things they love, they will be able to generate advertising revenue by the older articles the longer they are on line. Read Write Web though has come up with the idea that the idea of the long tail might be a lot more complicated, and not as profitable as once thought.

Our take on this one is, depends on what you write about. For example, we offer two views of a similar subject that we have written about, via Google Analytics.

The first one covers ISO Hunt dropping United States users, that shows the long tail working, but it only worked on dates and times when something else happened, the first big spike is when ISO hunt dropped USA users, the second spike is when TV Links was raided, and the third spike is when Demonoid shut down. This article crops up whenever something is raided and shut down in the Bittorrent world. In this case, the long tail works as it should, a similar event triggers a number of people coming to visit the page, spending a good amount of time on the page, and then leaving the web site.

The other one is more of the traditional long tail, and looks like the one that Read Write Web is discussing in the model that they show on their web page. While it is more recent, it covers similar information about Bittorrent web sites being shut down and not reachable anymore. This one covers when demonoid was shut down; this one seems to have the traditional downward spiral of the long tail. Where no money is made, or can be made off the singular issue that happened, with the generally unhappy ending for demonoid users. They move on, life returns to normal.

It is often forgotten that money is to be made by leveraging the collective long tail, however, making money while being part of the long tail is very difficult. Specifically, in the blogosphere, the vast majority of blogs have very few readers. It is not realistic to expect these blogs to make money. As the enthusiasm and the incentive in the long tail begin to wear off, what would be the impact on the businesses that depend on them? Likely, the impact is going to be large. Source: RWW

There is a lot to be said about readership and how readership works, or does not work. We agree that the majority of blogs will not be read, we also know that a number of high power group blogs that cater to a niche like ITToolbox do not get coverage in systems like Techmeme, even if they cover the same basic information that is in techmeme. The idea of visitors coming to the blog is to hit the nerve ending on an issue.

No one cares if your kid shoots up drugs, but if you have dirt on a celebrity, and can keep the dirt coming, your blog will take off near immediately. If you write a technical blog, then you are dealing with a different kind of audience, an educated and inquisitive audience. You have exactly 5 seconds to engage them and give them a reason to subscribe to your blog.

The long tail works, but it depends on what kind of meme you hit, hit the right meme, write the right article about that meme and being on the long tail is valuable. If you miss the meme, then the article is not worth storage space over time. It is worth looking at the long tail on your blog entries to see which ones have captured a moment, and then focus on events, writing style, and information that caught the meme. That is more likely where the value of the long tail comes in, and where a blogger stands to make money off their own work.