Week 9: Leveraging the Long Tail

Our Web 2.0 pattern for the week is "Leveraging the Long Tail".  The "Long Tail" is the large number of small niche successes that are increasingly making up the bulk of most products and services, and is distinct from the "Head", the comparatively small number of mass-market products.

"Leverage" is an over-used and under-defined business term that can be taken here to mean "finding success in", or "monetising".  So we must talk about a service that allows people to find success in The Long Tail, and what better example than our old friend YouTube?

Yes! YouTube, service for the sharing and distribution (and monetisation!) of video content.  YouTube may be the perfect example, since anybody can upload videos, and the people who actually want to watch those kinds of videos will be be able to find them easily enough with YouTube's already pretty stellar search functionality.

The popularity of it's videos and channels matches perfectly the graph given above.  You have a few channels that most people watch, but most channels only a few people watch.  Different channels and users are able to provide whatever content they want to provide, and the people who come to watch are watching only the videos that they want to watch.

Finally, YouTube allows you to monetise your channel!  This means that anybody with a YouTube partnership is allowed to gain advertisement revenue from people watching their content.  It's true that you require a large number of viewers to guarantee a large income, but nevertheless it remains true that those in The Long Tail can experience some monetary reward for their hard work.