Long Tail Theory

In today’s class session, we learned about the Long Tail Theory researched and developed by Chris Anderson. The theory essentially stated that hard-to-find items hold as much if not more value than items in bulk. One example of this, as mentioned in class, is the site Etsy. It became increasingly popular not only because of people’s desire for their work to be noticed, but because of consumers’ desire for uniqueness. Since the site promotes the selling of handmade crafts made by individuals instead of companies and sweat shops, the products are obviously rare. My roommate, for example, received Jane Eyre earrings as a gift from a friend who visited the site.

Another example that falls under the Long Tail economic model is the time I searched for a rare game for a few days. I first tried retail stores like GameStop and Walmart, initially unaware of the rarity of the game. I then tried some mom-and-pop stores both here and back in Charlotte, but with no luck. I resorted to using the internet. The price of this old game was a bit higher than what I was willing to pay, so I searched through admittedly shady ecommerce sites. It was finally found at a cheap price, but I was lucky to have a legitimate, still-running copy mailed to my house.

While I expected a game’s value to go up once its production went down or discontinued but I found it interesting how much people are willing to pay for the copy of something of low replay value. It could be for nostalgia, use as part of a collection, or other reasons.

TvTropes falls under the gift economy cost model, since it’s a Wiki site. It recently asked users to fully commit to contributing to their site, but (that I know of) it’s a free service unless they’re running the site themselves.