I still believe (as the office skeptic / curmudgeon) that “The Long Tail” may be the candidate for this year’s most irritatingly obvious buzzword. Upon reflection, however, I must admit that the term provides a kind of comfort that it’s predecessor — “the 80/20 rule” did not offer. Namely, the visualization of a long statistical tail makes it easy to think of each instance on the tail as a blog, or a website, or some other little business struggling to (if you’ll forgive me) get its piece of the tail. The “80/20 rule” always seemed to imply that 80% of whatever you do or sell is wasted and ignored… which is the opposite of comforting. Maybe that’s why I smiled when I read about the new Internet Retailer report providing data on the current online retailing landscape. The headline is that the top 100 online merchants account for 53% of all online sales, compared with the offline world in which 63% of all retail sales are dominated by only 100 merchants. I smiled because I couldn’t help thinking about all the online merchants at the tail-end; small, specialized, probably struggling, but surviving because the Internet makes it possible to survive down there where the tail is thin.

My smile fell a bit when I read about the “browser satisfaction” index that had been contributed to the report as a result of surveys done by ForeSee. The index purports to rate online merchants from the point of view of browser satisfaction — apparently as a proxy for willingness to buy from a particular merchant. I probably have a variety of objections to this assertion, but I have ordered the report and will hold my tongue until all the facts are in. But one obvious “huh?!” bears mentioning. The top-rated site in this index is NetFlix… Last time I checked, NetFlix, as a subscription-based service, has a very different browsing / buying dynamic than, say, Amazon. NetFlix members have a powerful incentive to find something on NetFlix: they pay their monthly fee whether they order videos or not. Plus, NetFlix only “sells” one thing (DVDs), as opposed to Amazon that sells, what? a gadgillion things? Like I said, I’ll read the survey results in more detail and report back, but it seems plain wrong to include NetFlix in any such comparisons.

NG