VideoVoo: Online Video Marketing

As part of the Authors@Google series, Chris Anderson visited Google (July 18, 2006) to discuss his book, “The Long Tail.” The title refers to a phenomenon describing a well-known feature of statistical distributions (Wikipedia: also known as heavy tails, power-law tails, or Pareto tails) and has been capitalized popularized and creatively applied for web trends by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 article (Wired magazine) to describe business and economic models, especially referring to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.

The main idea is that those businesses that are caring to serve the millions of niche markets (neglected and untapped by most of the (big) companies working with large numbers), besides catering for the masses, are the tenets of business successes in the future that is becoming more and more digitalised and trackable.

The revolutionary idea has been developed into a blook (blog book), and is still evolving well after its first edition on the Long Tail Blog: e.g. from 18th April, 2007: “Those of you who have seen my speeches on the legal dimensions of the Long Tail know that I consider the absurdly complicated and expensive process of rights clearance to be the primary barrier to unlocking the latent Long Tail value in content archives. The example I usually give is WKRP in Cincinnati, not because there’s necessarily a lot of value in that 1970s sitcom, but because it’s often cited as one of the hardest TV series to clear. ” Chris has already given a speech on Second Life as a virtual Long Tail author. As Ilya writes: “Chris Anderson’s avatar talked about the effects of the long tail on media, the future of 3D printing, the incentives behind niche content production, and the implications of the recent YouTube-Google deal.” So this book will just go on and on, with a long tail.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibzF_7gSjyI]

Just to highlight two slides:

1, Does more choice mean more sales?

2,

• Isn’t the Long Tail full of crap?
• Yes. But so is everything else.
• Sturgeons Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.

It is a pity that “Adding comments have been disabled for this video.” It seems like Google is applying the same no-comment approach in its YouTube communication as in its Official Google Blog, which I cannot agree with (even if there is a 60% chance for flame war, it is better to see the freedom for adding comments than one single note).

Oh, yes, the keynote starts in medias res (the beginning, or the head belonging to the long tail has been cut off by the editors for some reason).