Seth's Blog : The (very) long tail

The (very) long tail

The average YouTube video gets five new views every day.

Let’s parse that for a second.

5 billion YouTube plays a day, spread over about a billion videos means that while some videos live in the short head and get millions of views, there are a huge number of videos that get fewer than a single view each day.

At some point, the long tail is so long it ceases to exist.

This makes it hard indeed to rely on persistence alone to find your audience. The buffet line is far too long and the plates aren’t getting any bigger.

PS! Chip Conley and I are doing a live online event today (8/15) at 4 pm NY time. It’s free and you can register here.

Chip is a bestselling author, a wise soul and a good friend. We were also co-authors of our very first book… in 1986.

37 years is a very long run in the world of book publishing, one that would be hard to imagine beginning today in the era of such a long tail. The number of books published each year has increased 50x, and when we add in social media, blogs and podcasts, the amount of content clamoring for our attention is perhaps up by a factor of a thousand. No wonder it feels noisy.

One approach is to make something worth talking about. Another is to connect and lead a community. Chip does both, with generosity.