The Long Tail Theory Gets Challenged, Just Not in Search Query Demand

SEO digest

Research has been cropping up in the last few years to challenge Chris Anderson's modern-classic theory of demand distribution. The Times of London had this to report today in their article - Long Tail Theory Contradicted:

The internet was supposed to bring vast choice for customers, access to obscure and forgotten products - and a fortune for sellers who focused on niche markets. But a study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this “long tail” theory: more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.

Personally, I don't think this is terribly shocking. The "Long Tail" demand theory has been questionedagain and again in application to sales of popular culture related goods (hmm... I wonder why they call it "popular" culture). However, there's one arena where the Long Tail plays out almost perfectly - search queries. Evidence?

How about Udi Manber, Google's VP of Engineering, noting that:

20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before

Or Google themselves explaining that:

so-called "long tail advertisers" make up half our revenue.

Or Dustin Woodard's investigation into the distribution of search query demand:

It turns out that, at least in this particular three-month data set, the top 100 terms accounted for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic.  Expand to the top 500, 1000, and 10000 terms, and just 8.9 percent, 10.6 percent, and 18.5 percent of all search traffic is involved, respectively.

"Top 100 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic" (Source: Hitwise) This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you'd still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic.  There's so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend.  To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

At SEOmoz, nearly every large client we work for has exactly the same type of traffic graph - I've even shown off SEOmoz.org's own via Enquisite. The long tail is regularly producing 50-75%+ of the search traffic to large sites. Don't be fooled by news that the "Long Tail" might not exist - it's just that it might not be as big or as valuable, particularly in "pop culture" niches like movies & music.

What do you think? Is the long tail dead? Are long tail queries driving the majority of your sites' traffic? What about value - are long tail queries impossible to convert or equally valuable?

www.seomoz.org

published @ December 23, 2008