About Me

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Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
I am a full time computer consultant for a small firm, focusing on the small to medium business sector. I am also a student completing a Double Degree in Business and an Information Technology at Queensland University of Technology. This has created a hectic schedule and, as a result I am always busy working on something.

I do however have interests that are outside of work and University, including active involvement in the scouting movement and regular games of indoor soccer at Brisbane City Indoor Sports. My passion however, has always been in computing. This is shown by my active participation in the computer club at high school. I joined the school computer club in grade eight and continued right through to grade twelve. I was also a member of the computer club executive from grade ten.

I intend to use this blog to discuss a variety web 2.0 applications and how they relate to the web 2.0 patterns. I encourage you to read my posts and make comments below.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Leveraging the long tail

The 7th pattern of web 2.0 applications, and the topic of this blog post, is leveraging the long tail. Tim O’reilly describes this pattern is about how making use of the internet allows a web 2.0 service or application which does not appeal to the masses but instead appeals to a small minority of people.

One a service is online, their user or customer base is no longer limited by geographical location as a web service can be accessed from anywhere in the world. This means that while the particular product or service being offered my only appeal to a small percentage of the total number of internet users (almost 2 billion on June 30 2010 – Internet world stats), their product will still appeal to a large number of people.

As well as the increased market size, there are other factors which allow web 2.0 applications to leverage the long tail. Some of these factors include

  • 24/7 availability
  • Cheap to update
  • Cheap to run

These factors combine to make running a website a lot cheaper than running a conventional store for example.

The web application I have chose to explore as an example of this web pattern is the iTunes store. The iTunes store is an online store for many different types of digital entertainment include songs, movies and TV shows. iTunes is able to leverage the long tail by providing a much greater range in their catalogue compared to a physical store. Whilst a physical store is required to stock all the products they hope to sell, iTunes provides digitally download copies when a purchase is made. They are also able to provide these downloads to users all over the globe at any time of the day or night.





As a result of these advantages, iTunes is able to maintain an ever expanding catalogue with over 12 million songs in February 2010 (iTunes Store tops 10 Billion Songs Sold. This large catalogue has allowed apple to take of the web 2.0 platform to leverage the long tail


References

Internet world stats – www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold
-http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html
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5 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 16, 2011 at 12:23 PM

    it was very concise explaination the 7th core. itunes is a great long tail strategy. I am also purchased the songs via itunes sometime. It's easy and they have all I want.

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  2. AnonymousMay 16, 2011 at 3:08 PM

    iTunes is one of my favorite program. Every day, I visit it to look for new songs and new movies. The result is so bad, they took my money many time.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMay 16, 2011 at 9:58 PM

    What a coincidence ! We wrote about the same Application. iTunes is indeed a great example of Leveraging the long tail but it occurred to me while I was reading your post as well as writing my own that it is also an unfair advantage for other media players that lack integration with iPod,iPhone,iPad. What are your thoughts on Apple making that integration with iPad iPhone and iPad entirely open source so anyone can really add it to thier own media player ?

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  4. DeanMay 18, 2011 at 6:26 PM

    I think that the technique that apple have taken is almost anti competitive. They do allow us to use other services to obtain new music but a purchase through itunes is encouraged through all these factors.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousMay 18, 2011 at 9:32 PM

    Great post, iTunes is an excellent example of long tail. I also think Apple made iTunes as open as they would ever allow... maybe not too much with iTunes store, but podcast and iTunes u? There are amazing free resources there. Even you don't own iPod or other apple devices, still you can use iTunes to access both paid/free contents.

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