[lbayes]

I like that the article is making me think about my beliefs in the long tail and how they may be in tension with my beliefs in the pareto principle.

The core long tail claim, as I remember it, was that the _area_ under the long tail was larger than the _area_ under the head.

Sometimes much larger.

I vaguely recall a claim that many businesses chopped off the market tail because it was often too expensive to serve those tiny segments (inventory, retail space, distribution, etc.), but that new technologies were reducing or eliminating some of these costs and making it possible to serve emerging, smaller markets profitably.

I wonder if some portion of businesses that see pareto distributions in their sales are just lopping off long tail revenues? I thought that was the central claim.

I also wonder if those pareto variants (i.e., 95/5 splits) were businesses that had potentially over optimized on their largest volume offerings?

Amazon was the quintessential long tail example, and I'd be surprised if anyone could claim that their their SKU count has decreased since 2006.

YouTube comes to mind as another great example of a business capitalizing on this phenomenon.

Consolidating markets (like ??) may be counter examples.

Now I'm curious about how to choose when to push in which direction.